What is PageRank?
Explaining what PageRank is can be complex. Errors can occur if the history of the web is not considered correctly.
PageRank is a patented algorithm by Google that assigns an importance value to a document in a set of documents. The PageRank patent explains in the abstract as follows:
A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database. The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it. In addition, the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document. The method is particularly useful in enhancing the performance of search engine results for hypermedia databases, such as the world wide web, whose documents have a large variation in quality.
In a set of documents, they are essentially evaluated based on the existing links between them, and based on the number of links, it is possible to determine the probability that a document will be visited. Based on these factors, it is possible to assign an index or rank to the individual link of the document. The set of indices ultimately provides elements to calculate the PageRank.
The PageRank of a web page is the vote of those who index pages (search engines) given by the probability of accessing that page globally. An algorithm resulting from a set of factors that regulate the analysis of pages based on the citations they have globally.
It is clear that, being a parameter given to a page on a very large base of related documents, promising that the PageRank can rise in minimal times (days) is not realistic at all.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing (now the partnership between the latter two is very strong to counter Google's dominance) prepare to analyze numerous sets of words (keywords) with their webbots (software that automatically analyzes the World Wide Web for specific keywords and areas of specific domains) according to timelines and methods that can sometimes be discovered only through empirical or experiential means on the web.
Knowing that the PageRank can be calculated with the following formula (or its variants given by the evolution of the web) makes us understand that the PageRank cannot be promised for sale by any SEO or web expert who wants to do their job with professional integrity and intellectual honesty.
The previous formula can be explained as follows: Pr[A] is the value of the PageRank of page A, which is equal in this case to the sum of the pages that contain a link to your page, weighted by the PageRank (the weight is always given by Google) of the pages that link to your site (their importance). If the pages that have a link to your site have many links, they lose importance in the link that connects your web page.
- PR[A] is the value of PageRank of page A that we want to calculate.
- n is the number of pages that contain at least one link to A. Pk represents each of these pages.
- PR[Pk] are the PageRank values of each page Pk.
- C[Pk] are the total number of links contained in the page that offers the link.
- d (damping factor) is a factor decided by Google and which in the original documentation assumes a value of 0.85. It can be adjusted by Google to decide the percentage of PageRank that must pass from one page to another and the minimum PageRank value attributed to each page in the archive.
In summary, in one sentence, from the formula, it is noted that as the number of total links of the sites that point to A increases, the PageRank increases.
The previous formula makes it clear that the popularity of your page or website depends on how many sites link to your web page and how many links your page has. Other factors should not be underestimated, but they are not manageable by the SEO.
Those who believe in the promises of PageRank sellers are like those who trust magicians or other charlatans who try to predict the future or cure serious illnesses with alternative medicines.
The honest SEO or web expert can only put the site in the conditions to receive the visits of the webbot to make sure that there are no obstacles to the growth of the overall page rank.
There are various techniques to increase the PageRank, which I want to explore in future articles because they are the knowledge that is the basis of some of my workshops.
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