The heart of Google's software spider is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages
developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.
Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of
Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of
their web search tools.
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web.
Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively
casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page,
the more important the page must 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 vote is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because
it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results.
It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from
known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They
rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites,
but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into
a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link
to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0,
it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast
link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence,
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for
page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a
page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by
pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make
other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers
each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you
if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated
text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to
your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a
page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the
pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
The bottomline for website owners. Find high quality link partners and avoid link
farms. Traffic Builder has for years supplied search engine tools that help automate
the linking experience. Recently we release Web Site Link Builder
and Link Bank.
Combine Traffic Builder with our new Link and Content Builder program we can assure our
customers more top listings than any other search engine marketing software or program.
