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What does it mean ?

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Pagerank

Updated : Saturday 12 February 2011

PageRank (PR, for those in the know) is to bloggers what the Holy Grail was to the Knights of the Round Table. Websites, blogs, social networks and the rest are all in constant quest of PR. They hope it will bring them eternal wealth in the same way the knights hoped the Grail would grant them eternal life. PageRank is in fact an absolute precondition for making a website profitable, or for making your fortune on the internet. It’s mainly what determines the popularity of a website, which, in turn, determines the amount of advertising that site generates. In other words, a website that is not very popular, with a low PR (1 or 2) will have a hard time attracting advertisers and can’t expect to earn much in advertising revenue. PR is actually an algorithm, a method of calculation invented by one of the founders of Google (Larry Page, what better name for the inventor of PageRank!) that enables Google to decide on the order of the search results it displays on the internet. The term PageRank just means the position (or rank) of the webpage, on a scale of 1 to 10. A website with a PR of 1 might be expected to appear at the bottom of page 1 on Google or even on the following pages, while a website with comparable content but a PR of 8 has a strong chance of appearing at the top of the first page on Google.

What is the basis of this PR algorithm? In fact, Google is as tight-lipped about the PR formula as Coca Cola is about its drink. Which is understandable, since the minute the formula is made public, it will be hard to prevent it being abused. Nonetheless, a certain amount of information has filtered out which makes it possible for website publishers to know how to edge closer to the Holy Grail. We know that the PR of a website is higher the more other websites have links to it. Imagine you have a blog. If handbag.com, NetDoctor.co.uk or, say, Jeremy Clarkson’s website, all of them extremely popular, mention your blog in a post and add a link to your blog, you have the magic key to open up the web and bring you advertising revenue! Purists will tell you, though, that to speak of the PageRank of a website is a misuse of language, as it refers just to the home page, while some of the other pages on the website may be more popular. In theory, you can calculate the PR of the different pages on your blog. Just to make life more complicated, Google has developed the PR formula in such a way that it now takes account of more quality-based criteria, such as the seriousness and quality of the websites giving links to your blog… If you want to find out the PR of a website or blog (or rather, what Google chooses to tell you), it’s easy, as there are a number of websites that will do the calculation for you, such as http://www.prchecker.info. All you do is enter the URL of the website whose PR you are looking for, and the information appears in a matter of seconds. You can also download the PR calculation tool offered by Google, which you will find in the Google Toolbar .

Since some of the ingredients in the PR mix have become known, website publishers have been engaged in a frantic chase after links. As always, some of them have done this in a reasonable way, simply by asking their blogger friends to add a link on their own blog. Others, more determined, have tried to enlarge their circle of blogging friends to drive up their numbers of links, on the principle of reciprocity: you put a link to my blog on your blog, and I’ll put in one to yours… The other thing they have done is register their blogs in one of the innumerable web directories (catalogues of websites and blogs classified by subject matter).

Obviously, not all of them have been able to resist the siren voices urging them to cheat – by adding links on pages of their websites to other pages of the same website, or by simply "buying" links.

However, Google has been swift to find them out and sanction them. The cheats risk being severely downgraded and finding themselves with a PR of 1 when they might have been on the point of achieving a 6 ranking. It’s a bit like getting penalty points on their driving licence. And apart from the humiliation, it can also cost them money, as they can kiss goodbye to any advertising revenue.

Either way, countless websites and blogs have been set up for the sole purpose of giving advice to bloggers and people publishing websites or forums about how to improve their PageRank. There has been a proliferation of "link brokers", too, serving the same purpose. PR, it seems, is generating its very own economy.

The whole concept of PR has evolved quite a bit over time. It started as a technical concept, then became an economic notion, and is now coming to be viewed as a "social" concept. PR is now a part of your social status, and not just on the internet. While, before, it might have been enough to state your job and the company you worked for to win admiration, now you need to show a healthy PageRank — that will work much better.