What is it?

Quite simply, "PageRank" is a numeric value that defines the importance a specific page or url is on the web. Google assumes that when one page links to another page, it is essentially casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is, is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is a very important one.

Link Farm Penalties and Ignored Links

It is also important to know that not all links are counted by Google. For example, Google filters out links from known "link farms". Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they themselves link to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So, the moral of the story is: Be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is probably a penalized page, and it may not be a good idea to link to it.

How PageRank is Mathmatically Calculated

To calculate the PageRank for any given page, first all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That is the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original math formula that was published when PageRank was still in development, and it is very likely that Google uses a variation of the math formula above... But they aren't telling us what it is. For the sake of having a general understanding of PageRank, this equation will suffice.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85. To simplify it: a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it). "share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level than it did for a page to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Well, whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing: A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms. Link farms are evil.

Remember: When a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn't give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn't a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page's PageRank value. It's like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren't given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as mentioned further down.

More Calculations

For a page's PR calculation, its existing PageRank is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank "voted" for it by its current inbound links: which may have changed since the last time the page's PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page's PageRank is arrived at. But what isn't immediately obvious is that it can't work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind:

1) Calculate page A's PageRank from the value of its inbound links: Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and it's new PageRank value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate.

2) Calculate page B's PageRank from the value of its inbound links: Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.

It is a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's PageRank until we know B's PageRank, and we can't work out B's PageRank until we know A's PageRank. Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can't we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.

The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. Eventually, a good 40 or 50 iterations can be sufficient enough to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn't produce enough of a change to the values to even matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it is probably the most contributing reason why the updates take so long.

One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are merely proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale, whic of course is known only to Google, to arrive at each page's actual PageRank. Even so, now that we have a general understanding of how PR-Math works, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.

PageRank Distribution

Every website has a maximum amount of PageRank that can be distributed between its pages by internal links. The maximum PageRank in a site equals the number of pages in the site * 1. The maximum is increased by inbound links from other sites and decreased by outbound links to other sites. We are talking about the overall PageRank in the site and not the PageRank of any individual page. You can reach this same conclusion by applying this equation to your own web pages.

The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases. The more pages that a site has, the more PageRank it has. It should be somewhat common sense, but, realize that if Google doesn't know the page is there, it won't count it as a part of the PR Equations: The only pages that count are the ones that Google knows about.

By linking poorly, it is possible to fail to reach the site's maximum PageRank, but it is not possible to exceed it. Poor internal linkages can cause a site to fall short of its maximum but no kind of internal link structure can cause a site to exceed it. The only way to increase the maximum is to add more inbound links and/or increase the number of pages in the site.

Google is Picky

It is strongly recommended to create and add new pages to increase a site's total PageRank so that it can be channeled to specific pages, BUT there are certain types of pages that should not be added. These are pages that are all identical or very nearly identical and are known as cookie-cutters. Google considers them to be spam and they can trigger an alarm that causes the pages, and possibly the entire site, to be penalized. Pages full of good content are a must.

Opimizing Internal Links: PR Manipulation

Any given web page will be included in the Google index only if one or more pages on the web link to it. That's according to Google. If a page is not in the Google index, any links from it can't be included in the calculations.

For the examples below, everything in the previous paragraph will be ignored: mostly because other "Google PageRank" online articles ignore it too. Also, it can be pretty damn confusing when comparing documents and links. The calculator operates in two modes: Simple and Real. In Simple mode, the calculations assume that all pages are in the Google index, whether or not any other pages link to them. In Real mode the calculations disregard unlinked-to pages. These examples show the results as calculated in Simple mode.

Even More PR-Math Examples

Let's consider a 3 page site (pages A, B and C) with no links coming in from the outside. We will allocate each page an initial PageRank of 1, although it makes no difference whether we start each page with 1, 0 or 99. Apart from a few millionths of a PageRank point, after many iterations the end result is always the same. Starting with 1 requires fewer iterations for the PageRanks to converge to a suitable result than when starting with 0 or any other number.

The site's maximum PageRank is the total amount of PageRank throughout the entire site. In this case, we have 3 pages so the site's maximum PR is 3. At the moment, none of the pages link to any other pages and none link to them. If you make the calculation once for each page, you'll find that each of them ends up with a PageRank of 0.15. No matter how many iterations you run, each page's PageRank remains at 0.15. The total PageRank in the site = 0.45, whereas it could be 3. This site example is one which is seriously wasting most of its potential PageRank.

-- Example 1:

Now begin again with each page being allocated PR1. Link page A to page B and run the calculations for each page. We end up with:
Page A = 0.15
Page B = 1
Page C = 0.15

Page A has "voted" for page B and, as a result, page B's PageRank has increased. This is looking good for page B, but it's only 1 iteration - we haven't taken account of the Catch 22 situation. Look at what happens to the figures after more iterations:

After 100 iterations the figures are:
Page A = 0.15
Page B = 0.2775
Page C = 0.15

It still looks good for page B but nowhere near as good as it did. These figures are more realistic. The total PageRank in the site is now 0.5775 - slightly better but still only a fraction of what it could be.

By technicality, these particular results are incorrect because of the special treatment that Google gives to dangling links, but they serve to demonstrate the simple calculation.

-- Example 2:

Try this linkage. Link all pages to all pages. Each page starts with PR1 again. This produces:
Page A = 1
Page B = 1
Page C = 1

Now with this example, the website has achieved the maximum PR. No matter how many iterations are run, each page always ends up with PR1. The same results occur by linking in a loop. E.g. A to B, B to C and C to D.

This has demonstrated that, by poor linking, it is quite easy to waste PageRank and by good linking, we can achieve a site's full potential. But what if we don't particularly want all the site's pages to have an equal share - which is usually the preference when you want to maximize or optimize your site's total traffic.

We want one or more pages to have a larger share at the expense of others. The kinds of pages that we might want to have the larger shares are the index page, hub pages and pages that are optimized for certain search terms. We have only 3 pages, so we'll channel the PageRank to the index page, which is page A. It will serve to show the idea of channeling as has been mentioned.

-- Example 3:

Now try this. Link page A to both B and C. Also link pages B and C to A. Starting with PR1 all round, after 1 iteration the results are:
Page A = 1.85
Page B = 0.575
Page C = 0.575

...And after 100 iterations, the results are:
Page A = 1.459459
Page B = 0.7702703
Page C = 0.7702703

In both cases the total PageRank in the site is 3, which is the maximum, so no PR is being wasted. Also in both cases you can see that page A has a much larger proportion of the PageRank than the other 2 pages. This is because pages B and C are passing PageRank to A and not to any other pages. We have channeled a large proportion of the site's PageRank to where we wanted it.

-- Example 4:

Finally, keep the previous links and add a link from page C to page B. Start again with PR1 all round. After 1 iteration:
Page A = 1.425
Page B = 1
Page C = 0.575

By comparison to the 1 iteration figures in the previous example, page A has lost some PageRank, page B has gained some and page C stayed the same. Page C now shares its "vote" between A and B. Previously A received all of it. That's why page A has lost out and why page B has gained.

...And after 100 iterations:

Page A = 1.298245
Page B = 0.9999999
Page C = 0.7017543

When the dust has settled, page C has lost a little PageRank because, having now shared its vote between A and B, instead of giving it all to A, A has less to give to C in the "A to C" link. So adding an extra link from a page causes the page to lose PageRank indirectly if any of the pages that it links to return the link. If the pages that it links to don't return the link, then no PageRank loss would have occured. To make it more complicated, if the link is returned even indirectly (via a page that links to a page that links to a page etc), the page will lose a little PageRank. This isn't really important with internal links, but it does matter when linking to pages outside the site.

-- Example 5: new pages:

Adding new pages to a site is an important way of increasing a site's total PageRank because each new page will add an average of 1 to the total. Once the new pages have been added, their new PageRank can be channeled to the important pages.

Let's add 3 new pages to Example 3. So, now there are 3 new pages but they don't do anything for us yet. The small increase in the Total, and the new pages' 0.15, are unrealistic as we shall see. So it's time to link them into the site.

Link each of the new pages to the important page, page A. Notice that the Total PageRank has doubled, from 3 to 6. Notice also that page A's PageRank has almost doubled. There is one thing wrong with this model. The new pages are orphans. They wouldn't get into Google's index, so they wouldn't add any PageRank to the site and they wouldn't pass any PageRank to page A. They each need to be linked to from at least one other page. If page A is the important page, the best page to put the links on is, surprisingly, page A.

You can play around with the links but, from page A's point of view, there isn't a better place for them.

It is not a good idea for one page to link to a large number of pages so, if you are adding many new pages, spread the links around. The chances are that there is more than one important page in a site, so it is usually suitable to spread the links to and from the new pages. You can use the calculator to experiment with mini-models of a site to find the best links that produce the best results for its important pages.

Quick Recap:

You can see that, by organising the internal links, it is possible to channel a site's PageRank to selected pages. Internal links can be arranged to suit a site's PageRank needs, but it is only useful if Google knows about the pages, so do try to ensure that Google spiders them.

The End of the Food Chain:

This is a quote from the original PageRank documentation from Google:

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet... Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly."

A dangling link is a link to a page that has no links going from it, or a link to a page that Google hasn't indexed. In both cases Google removes the links shortly after the start of the calculations and reinstates them shortly before the calculations are finished. In this way, their effect on the PageRank of other pages in minimal.

The results in Example 2 (see the previous section of this article) are wrong because page B has no links going from it, and so the link from page A to page B is dangling and would be removed from the calculations. The results of the calculations would show all three pages as having 0.15.

It may suit site functionality to link to pages that have no links going from them without losing any PageRank from the other pages but it would be waste of potential PageRank.

Although it may be functionally good to link to pages within the site without those pages linking out again, it is bad for PageRank. It is pointless wasting PageRank unnecessarily, so always make sure that every page in the site links out to at least one other page in the site.

It Really is a Popularity Contest

Inbound links, links into the site from the outside, are one way to increase a site's total PageRank. The other is to simply add more pages. Where the links come from matters. As was said at the beginning, inbound links from link farms can damage the PageRank and the site, and should be avoided.

The linking page's PageRank is important, but so is the number of links going from that page. For instance, if you are the only link from a page that has a lowly PR2, you will receive an injection of 0.15 + 0.85(2/1) = 1.85 into your site, whereas a link from a PR8 page that has another 99 links from it will increase your site's PageRank by 0.15 + 0.85(7/100) = 0.2095. Clearly, the PR2 link is much better... or is it? The "Google Toolbar" section below helps to answer this question.

Once the PageRank is injected into your site, the calculations are done again and each page's PageRank is changed. Depending on the internal link structure, some pages' PageRank is increased, some are unchanged but no pages lose any PageRank.

It is beneficial to have the inbound links coming to the pages to which you are channeling your PageRank. A PageRank injection to any other page will be spread around the site through the internal links. The important pages will receive an increase, but not as much of an increase as when they are linked to directly. The page that receives the inbound link, makes the biggest gain.

It is easy to think of our site as being a small, self-contained network of pages. When we do the PageRank calculations we are dealing with our small network. If we make a link to another site, we lose some of our network's PageRank, and if we receive a link, our network's PageRank is added to. But it isn't like that. For the PageRank calculations, there is only one network: every page that Google has in its index. Each iteration of the calculation is done on the entire network and not on individual websites.

Because the entire network is interlinked, and every link and every page plays its part in each iteration of the calculations, it is impossible for us to calculate the effect of inbound links to our site with any realistic accuracy.

Sometimes you just have to suck it up

Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated. Because of the PageRank of the pages at each end of an external link, and the number of links out from those pages, reciprocal links can gain or lose PageRank. You need to take care when choosing where to exchange links.

When PageRank leaks from a site via a link to another site, all the pages in the internal link structure are affected. Realize that this doesn't always show, isn't always apparanty, after just 1 iteration. The page that you link out from makes a difference to which pages suffer the most loss. Without a program to perform the calculations on specific link structures, it is difficult to decide on the right page to link out from, but the generalization is to link from the one with the lowest PageRank.

Many websites need to contain some outbound links that have nothing to do with PageRank. Unfortunately, all 'normal' outbound links leak PageRank. But there are 'abnormal' ways of linking to other sites that don't result in leaks. PageRank is leaked when Google recognizes a link to another site. The answer is to use links that Google doesn't recognize or count. These include form actions and links contained in javascript code.

Javascript and Forms code examples

A form's 'action' attribute does not need to be the url of a form parsing script. It can point to any html page on any site.

Example:
<form name="myform" action="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html">
<a href="javascript:document.myform.submit()">Click here</a>

To be really sneaky, the action attribute could be in some javascript code rather than in the form tag, and the javascript code could be loaded from a '.js' file stored in a directory that is barred to Google's spider by the robots.txt file.

Example:
<a href="javascript:goto('wherever')">Click here</a>

Like the form action, it is sneaky to load the javascript code, which contains the urls, from a seperate 'js' file, and sneakier still if the file is stored in a directory that is barred to googlebot by the robots.txt file.

Toolbar Complexities

Well, an obvious question would be "how much additional PageRank do we need to move up the toolbar?". First, lets look with more detail into why the values shown in the Google toolbar are not the actual PageRank figures. According to the equation, and to the creators of Google, the billions of pages on the web average out to a PageRank of 1.0 per page. So the total PageRank on the web is equal to the number of pages on the web * 1, which equals a lot of PageRank spread around the web.

The Google toolbar range is from 1 to 10. They sometimes show 0, but that figure is isn't believed to be a PageRank calculation result. What Google does is divide the full range of actual PageRanks on the web into 10 parts: each part is represented by a value as shown in the toolbar. So the toolbar values only show what part of the overall range a page's PageRank is in, and not the actual PageRank itself.

Whether or not the overall range is divided into 10 equal parts is a matter for debate: Google isn't saying. But because it is much harder to move up a toolbar point at the higher end than it is at the lower end, many people believe that the divisions are based on a logarithmic scale, or something very similar, rather than the equal divisions of a linear scale.

Let's assume that it is a logarithmic, base 10 scale, and that it takes 10 properly linked new pages to move a site' s important page up 1 toolbar point. It will take 100 new pages to move it up another point, 1000 new pages to move it up one more, 10,000 to the next, and so on. That's why moving up at the lower end is much easier that at the higher end.

In reality, the base is unlikely to be 10. Some people think it is around the 5 or 6 mark, and maybe even less. Even so, it still gets progressively harder to move up a toolbar point at the higher end of the scale.

"Ah, now it is all starting to make sense"

Keep in mind that as the number of pages on the web increases, so does the total PageRank on the web, and as the total PageRank increases, the positions of the divisions in the overall scale must change. As a result, some pages drop a toolbar point for no obvious reason. If the page's actual PageRank was only just above a division in the scale, the addition of new pages to the web would cause the division to move up slightly and the page would end up just below the division. Google's index is always increasing and they re-evaluate each of the pages on more or less a monthly basis. It's known as the "Google dance". When the dance is over, some pages will have dropped a toolbar point. A number of new pages might be all that is needed to get the point back after the next dance.

The toolbar value is a good indicator of a page's PageRank but it only indicates that a page is in a certain range of the overall scale. One PR5 page could be just above the PR5 division and another PR5 page could be just below the PR6 division: almost a whole division (toolbar point) between them.

Domains, Files, and Folders: Link them properly

To a web spider: www.domain.com/, domain.com/, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html are 4 completely different urls and, therefore, different pages. Surfers arrive at the site's home page whichever of the urls are used, but spiders see them as individual urls, and it makes a difference when working out the PageRank. It is better to standardize the url you use for the site's home page. Otherwise each url can end up with a different PageRank, whereas all of it should have gone to just one url.

If you think about it, how can a spider know the filename of the page that it gets back when requesting www.domain.com/ ? It can't. The filename could be index.html, index.htm, index.php, default.html, etc. The spider doesn't know. If you link to index.html within the site, the spider could compare the 2 pages but that seems unlikely. So they are 2 urls and each receives PageRank from inbound links. Standardizing the home page's url ensures that the Pagerank it is due isn't shared with ghost urls.

Imagine this example page: www.domain.com/index.html. The index page contains links to several relative urls: products.html and details.html. The spider sees those urls as www.domain.com/products.html and www.domain.com/details.html. Now let's add an absolute url for another page, only this time we'll leave out the "www." part... domain.com/anotherpage.html... This page links back to the index.html page, so the spider sees the index pages as domain.com/index.html. Although it's the same index page as the first one, to a spider, it is a different page because it's on a different domain. Now look what happens. Each of the relative urls on the index page is also different because it belongs to the domain.com/ domain. Consequently, the link stucture is wasting a site's potential PageRank by spreading it between ghost pages.

Adding new pages can have negative effects

Take a perfectly normal site. It has some inbound links from other sites and its pages have some PageRank. Then a new page is added to the site and is linked to from one or more of the existing pages. The new page will, of course, aquire PageRank from the site's existing pages. The effect is that, whilst the total PageRank in the site is increased, one or more of the existing pages will suffer a PageRank loss due to the new page making gains. Up to a point, the more new pages that are added, the greater is the loss to the existing pages. With large sites, this effect is unlikely to be noticed but, with smaller ones, it probably would.

The end result: Although adding new pages does increase the total PageRank within the site, some of the site's pages will lose PageRank as a result. The answer is to link new pages in such a way within the site that the important pages don't suffer, or add sufficient new pages to make up for the effect (that can sometimes mean adding a large number of new pages), or better still, get some more inbound links.

Google Toolbar (again)

If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, you will be used to seeing each page's PageRank as you browse the web. But all isn't always as it seems. Many pages that Google displays the PageRank for haven't been indexed in Google and certainly don't have any PageRank in their own right. What is happening is that one or more pages on the site have been indexed and a PageRank has been calculated. The PageRank figure for the site's pages that haven't been indexed is allocated on the fly: just for your toolbar. The PageRank itself doesn't exist.

It's important to know this so that you can avoid exchanging links with pages that really don't have any PageRank of their own. Before making exchanges, search for the page on Google to make sure that it is indexed.

The Subdirectory Myth

Some people believe that Google drops a page's PageRank by a value of 1 for each sub-directory level below the root directory. Example: if the value of pages in the root directory is generally around 4, then pages in the next directory level down will be generally around 3, and so on down the levels. Some people don't accept that at all. Either way, because some spiders tend to avoid deep sub-directories, it is generally considered to be beneficial to keep directory structures shallow, with just one or two directory levels in total below the root.

Math can prove this theory right and wrong at the same time, using the equations mentioned earlier. What it really comes down to is that if you have many many pages on a domain, just like a typical "family tree", the further up the tree you go, the more branches (links) there are. When you get to the tops of the tree, there have been so many brances before the tops that, in this analogy, a lot of the PageRank has effectively already been used up. Just think about it, you'll understand it in a minute.

The Yahoo and DMOZ Myth

It used to be thought that Google gave a Pagerank boost to sites that are listed in the Yahoo! and DMOZ directories. These days general opinion is that they don't. There is certainly a PageRank gain for sites that are listed in those directories, but the reason for it is now thought to be quite simple.

Google spiders the directories just like any other site and their pages have decent PageRank and so they are good inbound links to have. In the case of the DMOZ, Google's directory is a copy of the DMOZ directory. Each time that sites are added and dropped from the DMOZ, they are added and dropped from Google's directory when they next update it. The entry in Google's directory is yet another good, PageRank boosting, inbound link. Also, the DMOZ data is used for searches on a myriad of websites, which results in even more inbound links.

Listings in the DMOZ are free but, because sites are reviewed by hand, it can take quite a long time to get in. The sooner a working site is submitted, the better.

About this article

Most of this content is a mirror copy from the url provided below. I found it extremely informative and, as you probably know, websites and domains are very capable of packing up and disappearing in the middle of the night. I'm tired of clicking on my 1 or 2 year old "Favorites" (or "bookmarks" to you netscape people) and then finding out that that domain is GONE, and the information I hoped to keep is now gone forever. If you actually compare this page with the url below, you'll see I have "spiced it up a little" in a few places. Anyhow, for your curiousity's pleasure, here is where most of this content originated from: http://www.search-this.com/google/google_pagerank_explained.aspx