What's a Google Page Rank and Why Should You Care?

Many people do not understand much about Google, the Search Engines in general, or Search Engine Optimization. One particular area of confusion tends to be with Google's Page Rank system. So I thought I'd give you the in-a-nutshell explanation of what Google's Page Rank is.

Basically, a Google Page Rank is the numeric value assigned to a web page (1-10), based in large part on the quality and number of backlinks pointing to particular page. In other words, when another person puts a link to your website on their website, they're creating a backlink (a link back) to your website, and that, in essence, counts as a "vote" for your site on Google.

However, it's important to note that it's not the quantity of backlinks that is most important to Google. Rather, it's the quality and relevance of the backlink that really matters. In order for a backlink to help your site earn a "vote," it must be coming from a website that has content that is relevant to your own. So say for example that you sell dolls and stitcheries on your site, and there is a website selling beauty products that has added a link on their site to yours. That backlink will not help you with Google, because the content of each website is totally different (i.e. irrelevant).

It's also important to be aware that when you link to other sites, the relevance rule applies even more. If you link to a site with irrelevant content...and worse yet, one that has a low page rank itself, it can penalize your site with Google for doing so. And these are reasons why we need to care about our page ranks...because they can penalize our websites, which can cause lower results for our sites in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages).

There are other things that factor into Google's Page Rank system, and you can find lots of information about that on the web. But Google doesn't ever reveal ALL of its exact or specific criterion for determining page ranks. We know some things, as mentioned, but we can't know all. But it's good to pay attention to the factors that we do know about and can control, so that we can achieve the best page rank possible on each of our website's pages.