Dec 20 2008
PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page?s relevance or
importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google
listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing)
and PageRank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.
PageRank is
also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you?ve installed the Google
toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/).
But the Toolbar PageRank only goes from 0 ? 10 and seems to be something like a
logarithmic scale:
|
Toolbar PageRank
(log base 10) |
Real PageRank |
|
0 |
0 - 10 |
|
1 |
100 - 1,000 |
|
2 |
1,000 - 10,000 |
|
3 |
10,000 - 100,000 |
|
4 |
and so on... |
|
We can?t know the exact details of the scale because, as we?ll see later, the
maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its
re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only
anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply
give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest
appropriately.
Also the toolbar sometimes guesses! The toolbar often shows me a Toolbar PR
for pages I?ve only just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index yet!
What seems to be happening is that the toolbar looks at the URL of the page
the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last ?/? (i.e. it
goes to the ?parent? page in URL terms). If Google has a Toolbar PR for that
parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that as the Toolbar PR for this page. If
there?s no PR for the parent it goes to the parent?s parent?s page, but
subtracting 2, and so on all the way up to the root of your site. If it can?t
find a Toolbar PR to display in this way, that is if it doesn?t find a page with
a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out.
Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page
is 0 - though its PR will be calculated shortly after the Google spider first
sees it.
PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it?s
written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link!
Home 
Webmaster Said:
Thank you.