What affects a website's page rank? (3 posts)

Can anyone explain what are the various factors affecting a website’s page rank?

PageRank is actually a very complicated algorithm and its full discussion is not possible here. But to explain it briefly, there are many things that make up a web page’s ranking within the search results. First off, Google places more importance on outbound links originating from your website, provided they connect to similar pages. While Google is more concerned with the quality of the link, Bing likes to match the content.

The use of keywords in the title tag is a big help in letting the web spiders know what the contents of the page are. Search engines reward websites for following such good practices by placing them on a higher rank than those that do not. Also, when it comes to topics that are very much searched for, freshness of the content is given a great priority. That is why you will find almost all websites regularly overhauling their content.

Maintaining an XML sitemap is a good thing as it tells the crawler that the website has no broken links (of course assuming that there are none!). There are a number of other factors also. If you found this info interesting, I recommend reading up the Google guidelines.

Regards

Adam Smith

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 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.