Understanding Google PageRank Better
Google PageRank has a rather complex mathematical formula to arrive at the appropriate rank of a particular webpage. While PR is automatically computed and made simpler by software, it is best to have a short glimpse of the manual method and the process of how it is computed. By understanding the PageRank of Google better, you can formulate better plans and strategies that work in improving the PR of your blog.
Google PR Formula:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d {PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)}
The above formula was developed by then students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University in 1996. It was a part of their research project. Sergey Brin had first imagined having a system like a search engine that collects all information in the worldwide web that can be arranged in a hierarchical structure according to link popularity. Thus, a webpage is ranked higher as the numbers of links grow.
Aside from Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the paper was also co-authored by Terry Winograd and Rajeev Motwani and the paper was all about the initial prototype search engine named Google along with the PageRank algorithm. In any case, the point is Google PR basically started along with Google, and up to now they co-exist despite the many changes to Google’s ranking algorithm.
But going back to understanding the PageRank better, the above formula looks confusing at first, but if you know what each component means then you will understand better how webpages are ranked based on the formula. Thus, from the above formula, PR(A) means the Google PR of page A. Take note that each page in a website is ranked separately. Hence, page 2 will have different rank with page 3 and page 4, and so on.
Moreover, PR(T1) denotes the PageRank of Page T1 that links to Page A, while C(T1) is the number of outbound links on page T1. On the other hand, d is a damping factor that can be set from 0 to 1. By looking at the formula alone, you can quickly tell the number of links is not all that matters, so it is not purely a numbers game. While quantity still matters, what matters most is the number of good quality links, more particularly high PR backlinks.
One conclusion that can be arrived at from the formula is that the PR of any webpage is recursively defined by the PR of those that links to it. So, the more high PR blogs link to page A, the higher will be its Google PageRank.
On the contrary, outbound links from page A will also diminish its rank since some will be passed on to the outbound link, the same way it gets link juices from incoming links. So the focus of your link building to optimize the Google PR of a particular webpage is to add or attract more high PR links, while minimize outbound links.
PageRank and SEO
While there is no direct correlation between search engine optimization and Google PageRank, Google said that blogs with high PR are more likely to appear at the top of the SERPs. This is because high PR blogs have massive link structure, and search engines mainly rank websites based on the quality of links, on top of other essential ranking factors that number by the hundreds.
Therefore, if you are optimizing your blog for the PageRank of Google then you are doing search engine optimization, as well, due to the backlinks built during the process. Getting a deeper understanding of Google PageRank is actually more intricate because of the complex mathematical process involved, but knowing the basics as mentioned above significantly helps during your Google PR optimization.