Google PageRank (PR)

What is PageRank?

The primary factor Google uses to determine PageRank is the number of links there are to the page in question. As you acquire links - especially from other sites related to yours, and those with good PageRank - your PageRank will increase.

Please note that whole websites don't have PageRank. Individual webpages do.

Your homepage will probably have the highest PageRank on your site, since it's the page that's usually most linked to. Interior pages often have PageRanks a bit lower than that of the homepage, though this isn't always the case. It all depends on the number of incoming links to each page.

Read Google's explanation of PageRank.

How do I learn what the PR of a particular page is?

If you don't wish to download the toolbar, you can use the PageRank lookup on our internet tools page to quickly learn your page's PR.

What's a "good" PR?

For example, this site's homepage is PR5, EmptyMirrorBooks.com & Oprah.com are PR6, ComedyCentral.com & Gibson Guitars are PR7, NationalGeographic.com is PR8, CNN.com & Yahoo.com are PR9, Google is PR10.

Remember PR only applies to pages, not whole sites. Each page has a different PageRank. Even sites with high-PR homepages usually have some low-PR pages, too.

What if my webpage has no PageRank?

Since PageRank is determined by the number of links, a webpage with no links to it will have a zero PageRank. This is very typical with new webpages.

But, if there are links to the page in question, it probably already does have a PageRank.

This is because although Google is constantly calculating and recalculating PageRanks, they only export PageRank values to the toolbar every 3 months or so.

So, the toolbar is still showing the PageRank you had the last time a PageRank export was done.

To put it another way, the toolbar PageRank isn't the "real" PageRank - just a snapshot of the PageRank at a particular point in time. Your "real" PageRank - the one Google uses - could already be 1 or higher.

So, if you have a PR of 0, or other low PR, just hang in there. It may be a few months, but the next time Google exports PR values, you'll very likely see that you do have PR.

In the meantime, don't worry about the issue, and focus on making your website the best it can be. Add good content (the kind that people will want to link to), and get some quality, relevant links to your website.

When will the the next toolbar PR export happen?

The last PR export was on April 30, 2007, so the next one was expected to be in late July or sometime in August. However, it has been delayed.

On October 1, 2007, Matt Cutts of Google posted on his blog, "I don't expect a full PageRank update for at least a few more weeks, and possibly longer."

So, perhaps the next toolbar PR export will be around the end of October.

Again, don't worry too much about it - just work on your website & you'll see your PR increase soon enough!

A little terminology: What are backlinks?

Links from your site to another site are called outgoing links, or outbound links.

How do I find out how many links there are to my webpage?

Follow the instructions below for each site. Do be sure not to type any spaces in the query! Including spaces will give you an incorrect result.

Using www before your domain name may give you a slightly different result than omitting it. Try it both ways.

Yahoo:
To check your links at Yahoo.com, type this into the search field:
link:www.example.com (see an example)

MSN: (note: currently this tool is not working)
To check your links at MSN.com, type this query into the search field (replacing example.com with your own domain):
link:www.example.com (com - see an example)

what about Google?

But, keep in mind that, unlike MSN & Yahoo, Google never shows all the links they've found, only a representative sample. If you have some links to your site, and Google isn't showing them, don't worry about it too much; it's likely they know about them.

Again, hang in there. As they do with PageRank, Google only updates their (incomplete) backlink counts every few months. The backlink update should come around the same time as the PageRank update. It will probably show a few links to your site then. But again, keep in mind that what they show is only a sample.

a better way with Google

The great thing about this is you can access a nearly-complete list of the backlinks Google has found. And, there's much more than links - you can also find what terms people searched to find your site, any errors Google encountered while crawling your site, and a plethora of other useful reports.

To sign up for this free service, go to Google Webmaster Tools. It only takes a few minutes and you'll be very glad you did.

How do I get links to my webpages?

How many links do I need?

Does PageRank affect how my site is ranked in a search?

How important is Page Rank?

Some people get pretty obsessed with their PR. Don't fall into that trap. Because, truly, there are other indicators of the health of your webpage.

For instance, is your page well-written? Does it satisfy your visitors' needs? Does it make sales for you? How many visitors does the page get? Are there links to it (from your own website, and from other websites)? How can you improve it?

Concentrating on those, & similar issues, is more productive than sweating over whether your PageRank is a 3 or a 4 today.

And, keep in mind that it's easier to get from a PR1 to a PR3, than from a PR5, to a PR6. As you go up the scale, it's more difficult to increase your PR.

And, sometimes PR is just quirky hard to explain. For instance, one of my websites' homepages had a PR5 for several years. There were several thousand links to it from related websites. Then, with one PR update, the PR inexplicably plummeted from 5 to 3. I was shocked. There seemed to be no reason for it. Maybe a few sites who'd linked to us removed the links. I don't know. But, with the next PR update, it went back to 5. (And now, less than a year later, it's a 6.) And, during the time it was PR3, I was still getting the same amount of traffic to my website from Google. People were still finding it just fine. I still don't know what happened. But there's no use in losing sleep over it. Just make your site the best you can, and you will be all right.

Questions?

best regards,
Denise