Beginner SEO Tip: What is Google Pagerank

Most webmasters are familiar with Google's page rank, at least they have heard of it. There is a great deal of confusion over what exactly it means and why you would want a high page rank. The truth is many webmasters pay way to much attention to their page rank, that being said it never hurts to have a high one.

Google page rank is nothing more than the way that Google determines how much authority your site has. Authority helps to determine how much value a link from your site will have. Most people know that getting links is important in order to get their website to rank well in the search engines, but it is not just about the number of links. More important than the sheer volume of links is the authority of the site they come from, a link from a high page rank site is worth the same as dozens of links from a low page rank site.

There is a lot of confusion about exactly what the value of page rank is, many people have the mistaken idea that it has a bearing on how that site ranks. That actually isn't true it is quite common for sites with page ranks of zero to rank at the top of the search results. Page rank determines how much link juice a site passes on to other sites not where the site itself ranks. This is an important concept that confuses a lot of people but it needs to be understood in order to do your SEO properly.

The question then becomes is it important to build page rank? And the answer is yes. The reason that you want to have a high page rank is that it makes it easier to get your other websites to rank well. Most webmasters have more than one website, and if they don't they should. By building up the page rank of your websites it is easy to pass link juice onto your other websites and help them to get ranked well. This can save you a huge amount of time when it comes to doing SEO.

One of the reasons that there is so much confusion about page rank and why many people think that it has to do with where your site will appear in the search results is that for the most part the things that you do to get your site to rank well will also increase your page rank. Page rank is largely based on the number and quality of links that are coming into your site. It is also based on how much keyword targeted content there is on your site. These are the same factors that are used to determine the search results, so building page rank can help to get your site to rank better.