We have to make sure we are talking about the same thing here. This terminology gets interchanged quite a bit. Sometimes people say Google PageRank when they are talking about how high a page ranks in Google. That is completely different than Google PR or Google PageRank. Google PageRank is often abbreviated as PR.
Google PR is a value that Google assigns to every single page it knows about on the internet. Google created a scale to show people approximately how much of this PR juice each page has. This scale goes from zero to ten. PR10 represents a lot more juice than PR9 which represents a lot more juice than PR8 and so on.
The only thing that affects PR of a page is links. The links can come from pages on the site you posted that article on or they can come from other pages on other sites on the internet.
PR gets passed from one page to another through links. However, the original page doesn’t lose its PR. A page cannot increase or decrease its own PR. It can only increase the PR of another page by linking to it. The PR of a page is equal to the combined total of the PR juice of all the pages that link to it. This is determined by a mathematical formula.
Contrary to what people think, the PR of a page has almost no impact at all on how well that page ranks in the search results. The PR of the pages that link to it does matter though. You want links from high PR pages if you want your page to rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). If a page has high PR then that page is very valuable to get a link from. That is the only real value in PR.
The homepages of old sites like EzineArticles.com have high Google PR because those sites have thousands and thousands of links pointing to pages on the site. Some pages on the site have links from other high PR pages. All of this PR juice gets spread out over the site because it flows through the links to other pages. It does not flow out evenly to all articles. Some articles acquire more links than others. Some articles acquire links from higher PR pages than others. The higher the PR is of the pages linking to you, the higher your page’s PR is going to be. There are other factors at play also such as how many links are on the page that links back to you and whether or not the link uses the No Follow tag. You need to study and understand the Google PR formula in order to really grasp the whole PR concept.
A site’s homepage tends to have the most PR because of the internal link structure of the site. The homepages tend to acquire more links than internal pages. Google PR is all about links and nothing else. It is not about relevancy. It is not about quality. It is simply a mathematical computation for measuring the link structure of every single page Google knows about on the internet.
Relevancy and quality are extremely important for getting pages to rank well, but they are completely irrelevant to Google PR scale values.
You get PR by getting links from other pages on your own site or other pages from other sites. PR is all about links and nothing else.
Summary of what PR really is:
- PR is calculated for every single page that Google knows about on the internet. PR is assigned to each individual page and not to a website as a whole.
- PR is simply a mathematical representation of the inbound link structure of a page.
- The PR value you see on the Google Toolbar is not the same as the PR value that Google uses in its computations. The value Google uses in its computations is a lot more precise. The toolbar value is simply an approximate scale of the value.
- PR juice is divided by the total number of outbound links on a page.
- The PR scale is not linear. The scale is skewed. Each move up the scale represents an increase in power by a factor of 5 or 6. So a PR4 link would be about six times more powerful than a PR3 link assuming every other factor was equal.
- PR is a live value that is constantly changing. That means PR changes instantly as soon as Google discovers a new link to your page. The PR you see in the toolbar is only updated once every few months. It is only an approximation.
Summary of Why PR matters:
- PR matters because Google uses it to determine how important links are.
- High PR pages are very valuable sources of links
- In order for a high PR page link to be really valuable, it would also have to be relevant to the topic of the page it links to. (research something called Topic Sensitive PageRank)
- Higher PR pages usually but not always have other qualities that help to increase the SERP ranking of other pages.
Other interesting thoughts about PageRank
- The flow of PageRank across the internet changes from moment to moment because there are new pages and new links being introduced into the formula every second of every day. Every single new page alters the PR value of every existing page on a very small level. Over a period of time, these small incremental changes add up. This is why you will see the PR values drop for some pages over time. They drop because that page hasn’t acquired new PR as fast as it has lost it.
- If a web page doesn’t continually acquire new links over a period of time it will lose PR. That happens because PR is relative. It is a relative representation of the inbound link structure of that page compared to every other single page on the internet that Google knows about.
- A page has no effect on its own PR value. The only way its PR can go higher is if other pages link to it.
- A page cannot lose PR through its outbound links. Pages appear to give away their PR but they can’t. This appears to happen because for every outbound link that points to an external website, the page has less juice to spread amongst its own website. That is why it adding a bunch of outbound links to other websites will cause the PR of your site to drop. For every link leaving your site, you decrease the value of your own existing links pointing to your own existing pages.
- You can increase the PR of the pages on your own website by creating more links on your site that point to other pages on your own site. This is a mathematical phenomenon because you are spreading more juice around to your own pages thereby decreasing the value of the outbound links to other websites. You see this on sites like Buzzle.com. They retain a lot of PR for themselves by adding a ton of links to other pages on their own site.
- Every single page in Google’s index has some PR. It might be too low to measure on the PR toolbar scale, but it does have some PR.
You shouldn’t become obsessed with PageRank. You can use it to help determine the value of acquiring a link from a website. But, that is about it. Remember that there are other factors that determine how well a page will rank in Google. The PR of inbound links is only one of them.
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