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When you enter a search in the Google Toolbar chances are that unless you're looking for something very specific you end up with thousands of results. Have you ever wondered why one result is number 1 on the list, while another result is all the way down on page 14? One of the factors that determine this is the site's page rank, and that is what I will discuss in this article.

Put simple a page rank is a way to grade how successful a site is. The higher the ranking, the better it is. When you first start out with a home page or a blog, you might go to a page rank calculator to see how high up you are ranked, and even though you have over a thousand page views you still find yourself with page rank 0. This is because the page rank is not based on how much traffic you have coming into your site, but rather how many people link to you from their web pages.

How much value one link has for your rank depends on the page rank of the site that's linking to you. If you get five friends to link from their personal homepage, and then you get one popular blogger to do the same, the link from the blogger will most likely be much more worth than your friends'. The total value on your own page rank reflects on the page rank of the site that links to you.

In short this means that the more successful the web pages that have your links on it are, the better it is.

The maximum page rank is 10. This is however very difficult to get, and anything above 5 is considered successful. You can have as high of a page rank as there are pages on your site, not exceeding 10. So if you have 6 pages on a web site, the maximum page rank you can have is 6.

Google had to come up with a system like this in order for them to categorize the importance of search results, but exactly how they calculate page ranks now is not known to anyone outside Google. The rank is probably calculated logarithmically, meaning it takes a lot more to advance from 5 to 6 then it does to get from 0 to 1, so as you climb the page rank it gets harder and harder to get to the next level.

Page ranks are usually updated every four months, and Google puts lots of effort into validating links. If they find out that several sites have links back and forth, or that there are excessive amounts of the same link on one page, the page rank will decrease. They also check the probability that a certain link is clicked by counting the number of links total. If there are very many different links on a page, then the value of one link goes down.

There best way to increase the page rank of a site is to get other high ranking sites to link to it. The sites should be up to date, and not flooded with links that the search engines will take as spam. With that in mind you can always check the page ranking of a site by using the Google Toolbar, and thus find out how valuable that site is according to Google's standards.

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