BACK TO BASICS: PAGE RANK EXPLAINED (2nd part)

This is in continuation of a previous article.

Since Google is the dominant search engine at this point, the competition is for websites to land on top of Google’s results. A website selling DVD’s would want to be on top whenever somebody types the following keywords: “Movies, DVD, online DVD store, and related words”. Imagine if your online store would land on top of searches for every item that you have on sale? Billions… nope, trillions of sales, even!

So the trillion dollar question is:

“How does Google determine who lands on top of its searches?“

In my amateurish mind, I strongly believe that PageRank determines your visibility on Google’s search engine. As the devil directly puts it: ”PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.”

How will your site/blog get a high pagerank? How does Google determine a blog’s pagerank?

In am not very comfortable, but feels the need, mentioning that I am running a PR-7, two PR-6’s, one PR-4 and this blog. I initially have no idea how I got those page ranks but after reading lots of articles, Googles explanation and my own scrutiny of my sites, I now have a good idea.

Let us start... I have read from an SEO consultant's blog (forgot his name and site) that backlinks form the backbone of Google’s page rank system. Visiting Google's website in search of an explanation, this is what I found.

GOOGLE SAYS: In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

MY INTERPRETATION: it means that whenever a page links at your blog, Google counts it as one vote.

GOOGLE SAYS: 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."

MY INTERPRETATION: If the page that linked to your site is “important”, there is an additional point for your site. The page that contains the explanation did not define “important” but in my belief, “important” means a page that has a lot of incoming links. Another way of putting it is, “A page is important” if a lot of pages links to it. So, if a page that has a lot of incoming links (e.g. www.johnchow.com) links to you, Google will probably count it as an additional point.

My example is my PR-4 site. I initially had no idea how it got that rank but when I checked my incoming links, I noticed that my blog is linked in the sidebar of a PR-5 blog. Therefore, my blog is linked in every page of that PR-5 blog. To make things more beautiful, that blog has so many pages.

This is probably the reason why a lot of sites buy incoming links, especially from High PR sites. Buying links speeds up the process of getting promoted to a higher PR. I used to want incoming links from other blogs in the hope of getting visitors of that blog to visit my site. Now, I know better.

I have read in some reputable blogs that Google frowns upon links to pornographic and violent sites. I have also read that Google is starting to penalize, sites that sell links. Such are supposed to be counted as deductions and will adversely affect a site’s PageRank.

There are many other factors that determine pageranks. As Google explained: “we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis.”

But in my experience, what I wrote above were the main reasons why my sites got their page rankings.