Most website owners know they need to have a high Google Page Rank, but they don’t always know what that really means. What is Google Page Rank? Why is it important? How can I find my Google PR? These are common questions we come across on a regular basis, and it’s time to set the record straight.
Let’s take a look at how Google page ranking works and how it influences the success of your Michigan internet marketing campaign.
What Is Google Page Rank?
Google PageRank (PR) is a measurement of how important a webpage is on Google’s search engine in comparison to other pages. In essence, every page on your website is a candidate in an election, and links from other sites to your site are considered “votes” for each candidate. The more votes your page gets, the higher your PR will be.
NOTE: PageRank Does NOT Determine Your Search Engine Ranking For Specific Keywords
While your PR will pay a role in your search engine ranking for target keywords, it is not the only factor in the equation. If it were, top-ranking sites like Adobe and YouTube would be at the top of the rankings no matter what. Having a strong PR will help your website as a whole, but that does not guarantee a high ranking for your target keywords.
What Determines My PR?
There are several factors that influence PR, but the primary factor is the number of backlinks your website or a specific page on your site receives from other places online. Simply having a lot of backlinks is not enough though. The quality and validity of those links also plays a role in your PR. If you run a beauty blog online, a link on a roofing company’s website won’t do you a whole lot of good. The links need to be from legitimate, well-ranking sites in the same niche or high-value sites as a whole (news sites, government websites, university websites, etc.).
Beware of aggressive link building strategies to boost your Google PR. Getting 500 backlinks for $100 may seem like a great deal at first, but most of those links will be from spam sites known as link farms that are solely created for backlinks. These sites may actually hurt your PR, rather than helping it. You want nothing to do with these sites – ever.
How Can I Check The Google PageRank For My Website?
Each page on a website and each website as a whole are assigned a numerical ranking, 0-10, with 10 being the highest possible ranking a website or webpage can have. You can use a free page rank checker like CheckPageRank or PRChecker to do this easily online. Most PR checkers will require you to answer a CAPTCHA to verify that you are not a bot of some sort. Beware of checkers that do not ask for this as most of them do not have accurate ranking information.
At one point in time, people used the Google Toolbar to check page ranks as well. Google stopped supporting this feature last year, but some guides may still reference it as an option.