Comments on: Google Page Rank

By: Google News 17 Nov 2008 - 24 Nov 2008 | WeGoSe Media

Google News 17 Nov 2008 - 24 Nov 2008 | WeGoSe Media — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:34:50 +0000

[...] Google Page Rank By Shawn Powers Can someone explain to me what Google Page Rank is all about? Apparently my site recently went down a point from a pagerank of 6 to 5. I guess a 5 is still good, but in the grand scheme of things, I don’t get what that means at all. … [...]

By: Carol Elaine

Carol Elaine — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:20:34 +0000

I’m a three. I have no idea why.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:49:30 +0000

I’m a three, so youz beatz mez.

By: Random Michelle K

Random Michelle K — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:48:37 +0000

From my stats, there’s necessarily not a link between number of hits and page rank. So I think a lot may depend upon whether you hits come from other sites or from e-mail.

By: MOM

MOM — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:38:06 +0000

I don’t think I have any and I’m perfectly OK with that

By: carlie

carlie — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:26:14 +0000

Ummm, mine is a 2.

By: Jeri

Jeri — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:10:38 +0000

I think maybe your five has a lot to do with your big Digg spike – that huge traffic hit that day pushes your average up quite a bit.

But I don’t do this for a living, have just read and dabbled a bit.

By: Vince

Vince — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:53:18 +0000

Determining why you are a 5 would require a fair amount of research. As far as why the change, PageRank changes for various reasons – updates of the algorithm, other pages making changes that makes them appear to be better or worse than you, new sites, sites dropped from the index, hiccups in the algorithm (seriously), a suddenly popular post, and for no reason any outsider can tell.

By: Shawn Powers

Shawn Powers — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:39:28 +0000

Vince: Cool. So, why am I a 5? Based on other “5″ blogs, I’m totally not worthy.

And that I was a 6 several months back completely befuddles me. Again, not complaining, just totally confused. Maybe because I put a link to my site from my Linux Journal signature file? That must be it, I can’t imagine anything else that would do it.

By: Vince

Vince — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:34:17 +0000

Shawn, a good overview of PageRank can be found on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. Yes, it’s trustworthy. But warning – it involves math.

Basically, PageRank is a measure of the relative importance of a page when compared to other pages given a specific set of search terms. This is done primarily, but not exclusively, by determining the number of links to a page and the weight of those incoming links. Weight is determined in part by the PageRank of the links, in part by how relevant to the page the incoming links are (if the page is about bunnies and the incoming link comes from a page about dogs, less weight; if it comes from a page about rabbits, more weight), and secret patent sauce no one but Google and perhaps Stanford University knows.

PageRank is just part of how Google determines the popularity of a site, and therefore how it should rank. And the PageRank given in the Google toolbar is mostly useless, so just ignore it.

By the way, a major part of what I do for a living involves search engine optimization, so i’m, like, sort of an expert on this.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:21:31 +0000

I’ve got a 2.

By: Jeri

Jeri — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:09:28 +0000

I think that page ranking algorithm is kind of a secret sauce recipe.

Still, a five is made of awesome. I did some checking, and it’s up there with some big name bloggers – Scalzi’s old blog, Penelope Trunk, Jay Lake, Paperback Writer.

I rate a 3, as do many of the UCF types.

One of the things that page rank does for you is determine your placement in search term results against other sites, and I’ve always been quite happy with mine.

By: Random Michelle

Random Michelle — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 23:06:37 +0000

If you find out, let me know.

Different pages on my site have different rankings, and the page I get the most e-mails about isn’t even ranked.