PageRank in Google

If you've struggled to get your site listed high in Google, or if you have a new site and want to by-pass the weeks or months it can take to get indexed, you need to pay attention to what Google is all about. 

And remember you can make money from your site by partnering with Google ...

This is what Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (the two founders of Google) wrote about their new search engine while at Stanford University:

"Google is designed to be a scalable search engine. The primary goal is to provide high quality search results over a rapidly growing World Wide Web. Google employs a number of techniques to improve search quality including page rank, anchor text, and proximity information.

"The citation (link) graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps containing as many as 518 million of these hyperlinks, a significant sample of the total. These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page's "PageRank", an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the result.

"Another intuitive justification is that a page can have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at. Also, pages that have perhaps only one citation from something like the Yahoo! homepage are also generally worth looking at. If a page was not high quality, or was a broken link, it is quite likely that Yahoo's homepage would not link to it. PageRank handles both these cases and everything in between by recursively propagating weights through the link structure of the web.

"Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page's importance or quality." (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine) http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

And this is what Google currently says about page ranking:

"While we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

"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."  

So if you have a new website, the fastest and easiest way for it to get in all the major search engine indexes is to have a few strong text links from relevant websites. This can get your site listed in days rather than weeks or months because as the search engines spider websites with high page rankings, they'll also follow the link to your site and spider your content. And since high-ranking websites often get spidered many times a day, your site will also be visited and indexed.

Write101 currently has a page rank of 6/10 and appears on the first page (out of more than 90 million results) for the term how to write well. If you have a writing-related website (or a site with related content), and you'd like to take advantage of Write101's page ranking, email me now to discuss how I can help.

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Copyright 2006 Jennifer Stewart Write101.com