Google Webmasters Help FAQ

One of the most frequented subjects of concern in the Google Webmaster Help group and most SEO forums is regards to PageRank. That little green bar in your Google toolbar that has cause more headaches than any other invention in recent memory.

The short answer is to get more and better links to your site/page.

As reference I’d like to quote Google’s own statement on the PageRank technology.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

While this rather simple explanation seems to answer all questions there are some underlying principles that should also be mentioned.

1. Not all links are created equal: Some pass very little page rank and others pass none.
2. Links Change: What may have had value yesterday may not have value today as Google is constantly updating their calculations methods.
3. Toolbar PR: What you see in the toolbar is actually only a snapshot of the pages PageRank taken sometime in the past. Updates to the toolbar are infrequent and vary between 3 to 6 months. Different datacenters show different PageRanks sometimes as well.
4. Banned Sites: Banned and penalized sites used to show gray in the PageRank toolbar, but that practice has been depreciated and even pages that are no longer in the index may show PageRank. The absence or presense of PageRank is not a good indicator of the page’s indexing status in Google.