Google Page Rank in Plain English

Just about everyone knows about Google’s Page Rank system. But the majority of the sites explaining how Page Rank works, and how to increase your Page Rank go into great detail over algorithms and other confusing things. This article was written for those who would like to know more, but need it written in plain English. Please, if you find this article usefull, link to it on your site.

Links are Votes
If you think of links to other sites as votes, then Page Rank is a popularity contest. Who gets the most votes is who is the highest. When you link to another site, you are essentially voting for them. When others link to you, they are voting for you.

Links to outside sites can affect you
Google knows that you can’t stop someone from creating a link farm, and putting a link to your site on every page. So you won’t get punished if they find you in one. But if they find out you are linking on all your pages to a link farm, you could find yourself losing PR. Google doesn’t like link farms because it results in bad rankings. If they find out you are participating in one, you could even get de-listed!

Use internal links effectively
Each page in your site has a different Page Rank, but overall your site will keep the same average rank. If you keep this in mind, you can channel your PR to specific pages, so they have more than others. Or if you have a mesh of links (each page linking to all the others, similar to this site) you can distribute it to all your pages evenly. But note that my main page has a higher PR. Why? Its because every page links back to it, but not every page links to every other page.

Page rank is limited to your site size
Your site can only reach a certain page rank, if it has so many pages on it. I don’t know the numbers, because Google keeps it a secret. The fact is, if you have more pages your page rank can get higher. The amount of content on each page wont affect the PR, but it will still affect your search engine ranking.

Some links are worth more than others
Google has some kind of algorithm where you get a percentage of the page rank of the site linking to you. So if a 10/10 site is linking to you, you are getting X% of that 10. One thing to note though, one link from a 10/10 site is worth more than 11 links from 1/10 sites. But that shouldn’t stop you from getting links on those sites either!

Each page has its link limit
Google doesn’t like link farms, in fact after so many links on a page, it will stop giving out Page Rank. Many beleive the number is somewhere around 200. It is high enough where news sites can have alot of news without getting cut off, it does prevent someone from creating pages with thousands of links on them.

External links bring your rank up
This is probably the most obvious thing about Page Rank. The more sites you have linking to you, the higher your Page Rank will go. One thing noted on many sites is that your Page Rank will only go up if a site linking to you has a Page Rank of 4/10 or higher. But don’t let this stop you from swapping links with sites lower than you. Their Page Rank can go up next time Google updates their index!

Thanks for reading my article on Google Page Rank. Please be aware that I don’t work for Google, and that this is all information I have learned from reading websites that study it closely. They tend to have alot of explaining in depth on the actual algorithms, so I wrote this for those who would like to learn more about it in an easy to understand way. Again I ask if you found this article usefull, please link to it on your site!