What is Google’s PageRank Calculation?

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Google’s Page Rank calculation is Google’s way of deciding the relative importance of a website. PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web according to Google. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively 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 webpage’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. PageRank isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is a very important one.

Wikipedia’s definition of PageRank: “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.” Full PageRank Definition

Tags: Google Page Rank, PageRank, PageRank Calculation, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
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