Notes on How Google Assigns PageRank
Date Added: March 17, 2009
Author: Jessica Navarro
In the SEO realm there is a lot of attention paid to PageRank as an indicator of a domain’s value. Although it is one of the most important aspects of a domain’s worth in the eyes of Google, there are a few points that should be mentioned.
Pages that don’t have any PageRank are often symbolised as having N/A PageRank.Google assigns each page on the internet a weight and when one page links to another it passes some score onto the page it is linking to. The higher the PageRank, the more likely Google is to trust it. This is true for both external and internal links. First of all, for whose who don’t know what PageRank is – it is a score used by Google to decide how important a domain is based on analysis of link on the internet. Google PageRank has eleven scores, between 1 and 10.
So, if a web page has 4 PageRank 4 and 3 PageRank 3 links pointing at it, it will probably be assigned a PageRank of 4. PageRank is generally not assigned to a web page higher than the pages that link to it. A website can have a high PageRank with relatively few links pointing to it if those links are of a high PageRank.Sheer quantity of links does not help to increase PageRank. Probably the most important factor in the distribution of PageRank to a web page is the PageRank of the pages linking to it. It should be noted, web pages that have a lot of low PageRank and PageRank N/A links pointing to them can have their PageRank lowered as a result. The higher the PageRank of pages linking to a given page, the higher its PageRank is likely to be.
Some people suggest that the text content of the page affects PageRank assignment, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. There is no evidence that text affects PageRank other than pages that have been spammed often have their PageRank removed.
When it come to sub-pages, the time Google has known about them is a factor in PageRank assignment. When new sites first get assigned PageRank their sub-pages often remain without any PageRank. In general, sub-pages are a little slow to get assigned PageRank. Google is generally less trusting of sub-pages unless they belong to a trusted domain. In particular sites with a lot of sub-pages and even more so sites that link to a lot of internal pages (like directories) can struggle to pass their PageRank to internal pages.
The architecture of the site has a major role to play in the assignment of PageRank. Google uses what is known as block level analysis to analyses web pages. They use their vast knowledge of the structure of the web to decide what links on a page are probably the most trustworthy and the pages these links point to are more likely to receive PageRank.
Google can and do manipulate websites’ PageRank. This is generally as a penalty for sites that have used unhonest methods. This can often cause all the site’s sub-pages to loose their PageRank. It has also been claimed that in the past Google has made mistakes in PageRank assignment.
Lastly, the PageRank of a web page may change even when there has been no change in the hyperlinks pointing to that page. This is either due to changes in the structure of links between all websites or modifications made by Google.