by Michy Lynn

Created on: December 28, 2007

Google touts PageRank as the heart of the software for their search engine rankings and results. Essentially, PageRank determines, in Google's opinion, the value or importance of a webpage by examining the link structure of the internet.

Google sends out bots to scan web pages for inclusion in their search engine. Each time Google's bots find a link on a webpage, they follow that link to its page on the internet. Google then can determine the number of links leading to the same page from all over the internet. Basically put, that determines the PageRank of the page, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

If only the total number of links mattered, it would be relatively easy to get as many links as possible out on the internet leading back to a particular pagetime consuming, yes, but relatively easy. However, there is more involved in determining PageRank than just the total number of links to a particular page or site.

Not only does Google look at the number of links coming into a page from across the internet to determine PageRank, but it goes a bit farther and also looks at the relevancy and PageRank of the pages that link to the page. For example, a webpage that sells automotive parts linking to a webpage about parenting will not carry as much weight as a website about parenting linking to a parenting page.

The reason for considering relevancy is to prevent falsely increasing PageRank by doing things such as link farming, link trading/selling and link spamming. This is a practice where web developers offer to trade links, have a page of links that peoples have traded monetary value for having a link included, or by putting links in the comments sections of blogs or other user input areas of higher ranking pages in order to gain a link back to the site.

Additionally, Google considers a link to a site as a vote' for that site on the internet. It doesn't really make sense for an automotive site to vote' for a parenting site, so that link on the automotive site is not given as much consideration due to non-relevant content.

Because of this, Google looks at the keywords and content on the site where the link is placed, compares that to the keywords and content on the site where the link leads, and if they are relevant, that link is given more value in determining PageRank than if they are not relevant.

After the relevancy of both websites is determined, Google then looks at the PageRank of the linking page. The higher the relevancy of the link and the higher the

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