Google’s PageRank And SEO
By in SEO on 6th October 2007
How is a page ranked in a search engine? It can be done using a mathematical equation which takes into account the amount of time the keywords appear on the webpage and then this would be factored with the location of the keywords in order to determine the webpage ranking. Alternatively, the other method used is to judge the number of times a webpage is linked to other web pages and this determines how a webpage is ranked. This is called link analysis.
Both these together figure in search engine optimization which really is an art and a science. It is this that makes a website attractive as far as search engines are concerned and for a website, a high rank is everything.
Right now, Google is the search engine that over 50% of searchers on the Internet go to. The second is Yahoo! What makes Google so attractive is its trademarked program called PageRank which was initially patented with the Stanford University. It was designed by one of the Google creators, Larry Page as you can see, the name is a play on his name. Together with Sergey Brin, both students at Stanford, Google was designed as a research project. What a distance it has come since then!
PageRank you’ll find, is based on what is called the link analysis algorithm. It assigns a numerical weight to each and every individual element of any hyperlink set of documents. The purpose of this is to measure its relative importance with the set. The numerical weight that is assigned to any element is called PageRank of E and you’ll find that PR(E) is the denotation used. It really does operate like a voting booth. Every time that it finds a hyperlink to a webpage, PageRank counts it as a vote which supports the webpage. The more pages that link to a page, the more votes of support that the webpage receives. If PageRank comes up against a website that has absolutely no links connecting it with another webpage, then it does not get any votes at all. However, tests have proved this is no infallible system. An alternative is the HITS algorithm.
Google does not like the idea of spamdexing and in 2005, a program called ‘nofollow’ was designed which allowed webmasters to create links which PageRank would ignore. This also keeps spamdexing to a minimum.
PageRank has now been redesigned to be an eight-unit measurement. Google displays the value that PageRank places on each website right next to each website it displays. What has been proposed is that PageRank should be used to replace the ISI impact factor so that one can determine the quality of a journal citation.
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