Why Higher PageRank Helps Search Results

You’ve probably noticed the term “PageRank” buzzing around the Internet, especially if you’ve been looking for ways to help your website to appear higher in organic search results.  However, you maybe wondering what exactly Pagerank is, and how does it help search results for your website? 

PageRank is a measure of Google’s perception of an individual web page’s relevance in terms of the quality, authority, and credibility of its information.  Google gives each web page an individual PageRank in the form of a numeric value ranging from 0-10 (with 10 being the best).

PageRank is Google's way of rating a website page's importance.  PageRank matters to your website because although is not the only factor Google uses to rate, and list web pages in search results, it is an extremely important one.

The majority believe Google calculates PageRank using a logarithmic scale, meaning the difference between PR4 and PR5 is likely 5-10 times than the difference between PR3 and PR4.  What this translates to is there are likely a 100 times as many web pages with a PageRank of 2 than there are with a PageRank of 4, and so on.

•    PageRanks of 0-3 are usually that of new websites or sites with very few links
•    PageRanks of 4 and 5 are indicators popular websites with a fair amount of inbound links
•    PageRank of 6 represents very popular web sites with hundreds of inbound links, many of which deemed quality links
•    Page Ranks of 7-10 are most often bigger media brands, large companies, leading industry bloggers, and often .org websites

Website page relevance is based on the content presented on your page, and whether it is a quality match for the given search term or phrase.  Another highly important factor for Google and is primarily the determining factor of PageRank is how many other web pages are linking to your webpage.  Google considers a link as being a vote of credibility in favor of your website.   

Google figures when one webpage points and links to another page, it is essentially casting a vote for that other page.  The more votes cast for a webpage, the more important that page is perceived to be.  Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it.

How important each inbound link a.k.a. vote is becomes a factor in calculating PageRank for that page.  But, there’s one thing to note:  Not all inbound links are thought to be equal.  Web pages with more credibility that link to your webpage give you more “value” in terms of helping to increase your PageRank, than those with less credibility.

Now lets assume your web page and your competitors web-page both have the same relevance in terms of quality information, so  then whichever page has the higher PageRank will get placement closer to the top of the search results page.  As you can see, this is where PageRank becomes important to your website.

Your PageRank is the end result of all sorts of calculations, but in the end it's a popularity contest.  So the higher your PageRank is the higher your chances of being found on Google are.  Thanks for reading!  Feel free to share or write a comment below.