Google Page Rank Explained

Google’s job is to provide good search results. Whether it is a sponsored advertisement or a true natural search result, Google, like any search engine, wants to make sure the best possible result is displayed to each person searching.

They ensure this quality in the sponsored environment (Google Adwords) they require ad campaigns to meet a certain quality score. This quality score impacts what you ultimately are required to pay – ‘per click’.

They want to avoid serving results, even if they are paid, that might not be truly relevant to what you or I searched for.

They appear to employ a similar ranking system for natural search results. The website that shows up first or second will obviously get far more traffic from Google than websites that appear later in the results.

Google was actually one of the first social networks in that  you and I play a large role in search rankings. From the beginning they used an algorithm that, simply put, ranked every website in the world in order or importance.

This importance is described in something they call Google Page Rank.

Page Rank, as described on Wikipedia, is the ‘probability that a random person will log on to the Internet, and stumble across your website’.

They calculate this probability based on which sites link to your site, and how popular those sites linking in are.

It is sort of a democratic system, where the best site wins.

This is what spawned the massive push by webmasters and SEO experts to ‘build links’ into a website. Ultimately, Google seems to be able to tell if a network is real or not, and thus they discount certain links (as described by a mystery variable “d” which they call a dampening factor).

The interesting thing is that by utilizing social media optimization (SMO), links form in the blogosphere and social networks more naturally.

Thus, the bi-product of a good online discussion around your site can be increased Google Page Rank and better natural search results.

Written by Jalali Hartman