Google PageRank

These eight pages might be useful for webmasters to read before they decide to offer an opinion, or post a comment on a Forum about Google PR. 

Within the past few years, Google has become the far most utilized search engine worldwide. The main reason, besides high performance and ease of use, was the superior quality of search results compared to other search engines. One of over 100 factors involved in the Google algorithm is PageRank, a sophisticated method to rank web pages.
A note direct from Google on the subject of PageRank

Google PageRank 

The aim of these pages is to provide a summary of some aspects of Rank. The ideas expressed are based on papers by Google founders Lawrence and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University.

It is sometimes stated that too much time has passed since the scientific work on PageRank, for it still to be the basis for the ranking methods of the Google search engine. Despite the many changes, adjustments and modifications since those early days, and as many as ten per month currently, the fundamental concept behind PageRank remains perfectly valid.

The Google PageRank Concept 

Since the early stages of the world wide web, search engines have developed different methods to rank web pages. Initially, the frequency of a search phrase within a page was the major factor within ranking techniques of search engines. The frequency of a search phrase can be ranked as keyword density, or by its accentuation within a page by HTML tags. The advent of the current Google search technology has made that redundant. In view of the market domination by Google, there are webmasters who no longer even use META keyword tags, and are nevertheless No.1 in Google.

For the purpose of better search results and especially to make search engines resistant against automatically generated web pages, the concept of link popularity was developed. Following this concept, the number of inbound links for a page measures its general importance. Hence, a web page is generally more important, if many other web pages link to it, in other words, vote for that page.

Google PageRank and Relevant Links 

Contrary to the concept of link popularity, PageRank is not simply based upon the total number of inbound links. The basic approach of PageRank is that a page is in fact considered the more important the more other pages link to it, but those inbound links do not count equally. The basic principle is that a page receives credit from a link from another high ranking page. But that is not the whole story. If the page from which the link arises has no connection with the theme of the page to which the link points, any credit is doubtful.

So, within the PageRank concept, the rank of a page is given by the rank of those pages which link to it. Their rank again is given by the rank of pages which link to them. Hence, the PageRank of a page is always determined recursively by the Rank of other pages. Since the rank of any page influences the rank of any other, PageRank is based on the linking structure of the whole web. Although this approach seems to be very broad and complex, Page and Brin were able to put it into practice with their algorithm.