Thalasar Ventures

Google is the worlds most popular search engine and commands an 85% share of the search marketplace worldwide. Over 235 million queries are made on Google every day and webmasters have come increasingly to rely on Google as their predominant means for generating revenue. Google Page Rank is a metric used by Google to provide an indication of the relative importance of pages. PageRank is scored to a value of between 0-10 (some websites may have a N/A value, this generally means they have either been penalised or have not yet been assigned a PageRank value). The important thing to note about PageRank is that it’s both an internal and external value, and the internal value (known only by Google), is updated constantly and differs from the toolbar value that many webmasters see.

How does it differ? Well, the internal value assigned by Google uses multiple decimal points, whereas the toolbar value rounds each value up to a whole number. What does this mean for webmasters? It can mean that two PR 6 websites, despite having the same PR value, are world’s apart, despite having the same PR value e.g. one website has a PR value of 6.9 whereas another website has a PR value of 6.1. It’s also important to note that PageRank only updates, on average, once every three months. Thus, the toolbar value that you see may be correspondingly lower or higher when compared against the real and accurate value held by Google.

In terms of what PageRank means for your website, the concept as a whole is still important however it has been declining in importance over the last few years due to extensive manipulation. It is also possible now to “no follow” links – this essentially means that webmasters can take away any potential of passing on PageRank values to an external website or even internally using a process called PageRank sculpting. PageRank is still a significant ranking factor however it is far from being the be all and end all of Search Engine Optimisation. For example, a PR 0 link on the BBC.co.uk could prove far more valuable to your website than another PR 2 directory link.

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