Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Using PageRank

The PageRank algorithm is used in part by Google to order the results returned by specific search queries. As such, understanding PageRank is crucial to core SEO efforts to improve natural search results.

Depending on who you ask, PageRank is named after its inventor, Lawrence Page, Google’s cofounder—or because it is a mechanism for ranking pages.

When a user enters a query, also called a search, into Google, the result order of the returns is partially determined by the relative PageRank of the results.

Figure 4-9. A site map makes it easy for visitors to find what they need on your site and also helps optimize your site for search engines

Originally fairly simple in concept, PageRank now reportedly processes more than 100 variables. Since the exact nature of this “secret sauce” is, well, secret, the best thing you can do from an SEO perspective is more or less stick to the original concept.

The underlying idea behind PageRank is an old one that has been used by librarians in the pre-Web past to provide an objective method of scoring the relative importance of scholarly documents. The more citations other documents make to a particular document, the more “important” the document is, the higher its rank in the system, and the more likely it is to be retrieved first.

Let me break it down for you.

Each web page is assigned a number depending upon the number of other pages that ...