Google Page Rank, or PR for short is simply a way of rating a web pages popularity. PageRank is determined by the incoming links to your page, as well as other factors such as the PR of the pages that are linking to your page and the outgoing links on your page.

Page Rank is measured on a scale from 0 to 10, 10 being extremely popular, 0 being unpopular or unranked. The more inbound links from high PR pages a page has, the higher the pages PR will be. Although there is quite a bit more to all of this and it can get quite confusing, the overall meaning of PR that you should remember is that its simply a ranking of the pages popularity.

So how do you find out the Page Rank of your site or its pages? Simple, you can download and install the Google Toolbar, this toolbar integrates into Internet Explorer or Firefox and will display the PR of any page on the Internet. Alternatively, if you don’t want to install anything you can use a site like CheckPageRank.com to check your PR.

An important thing to know about pagerank is that just because a page has a high PR doesn’t mean it will get a lot of traffic. I’ve had several pages with high PR that get little traffic, and pages with little PR that get quite a bit. What it does mean however is that the higher your PR, the more weight your page is given by Google. PR is one of many factors considered in ranking the importance of your page in Google search results. Page Rank is also helpful to all the pages you are linking to from your page, even other pages on the same site.

Another benefit of having high PR is when it comes to trading links. Since an incoming link from a page with a PR of 5 is better than a link from a page with a PR of 2, having higher PR can give you leverage when exchanging links with others. Remember, incoming links with high PR will not only raise the PR of your own page, but also all the pages you link to from your page.

So what is a good PR? Can your page get a PR10? Well, there are very few pages on the Internet with a PR10, in fact, even a 7 or 8 is very hard to get and can take quite some time. I think a 5 or a 6 is very good and shows your site is popular and established.

Google updates its pagerank every few months. Google recently updated their PR and I was pleasantly surprised to see all the pages on this site get a PR of 4 or 5. Although my most recent pages will show a PR of 0 as they are too fresh to have been ranked yet.

If you want to learn more about Google’s Page Rank you may want to check out some of these sites…

Google PR as defined by Google.

An in-depth definition of the pagerank algorithm.

Page Rank calculation explained

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What is the difference between a 301 and 302 redirect? And what roles do these play in Search Engine Optimization? Matt Cutts, a Google employee answers these questions today on his blog. Apparently if you are going to use “www” in your links then it’s best to stay consistent with that. You can even do a redirect from a straight domain name example.com to www.example.com to help google pick the correct one. I will be trying this on my site and keep you update if I notice any changes or troubles by doing so.

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