Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Basics You Need to Know About PR

By Irmin J. Roybal

Tell me what is your PR, and I will tell you where you are. (slightly rephrased old Russian maxim)

While browsing the Internet you probably have seen this abbreviation "PR" and numbers from 0 to 10 associated with web sites. What it stands for? You may guess PR from Public Relations to Posterior Retentive, but the true reading is PageRank. Invented at Stanford University, introduced into practice by Google and as a concept widely adopted by many other search engines, PR, according to Google, is degree of "importance of a web page".

PR is a way to characterize link popularity of a page. Clearly, the more in-links the page gets, the more chances are that the customer directed to that page by a search engine will be satisfied. In spite of a complex algorithm for calculation of PR, one can easily estimate it in the following terms. In general, the more your page is getting in-links from sites of high PR and other pages of your site, the higher will be PR of your page.

Consider the following example. Home page of Site 1 has PR 4 and 40 outbound links, of which one leads to your home page. While index page of Site 2 has PR 3 and 3 out-links, of which one points at your site index page. Which site passes to your index page higher PR? Site 2, because in spite of a lower rank, PR of this site is divided by only three links, and hence more PR will be given to your site from this link.

Index page usually gets the highest PR at the site, because as a rule it receives a majority of inbound links. If the site contains some high-visited pages aside from its index, then PR of such pages can be the same or even higher than index page. However, this will be an exception.

You can determine PR for any pages using Google Toolbar in a browser, or through service sites, of which I would recommend My Google PageRank com (I have no affiliation with them, just a neat site:). Of course, the higher PR of your page, the higher probability that it will be listed on top of search results. Here are some examples of high-PR sites: Wikipedia PR 9, Amazon PR 9, eBay Sitemap PR 7, Google Home got PR 8.

PR is just one of multiple factors used in search algorithms. From my own experience, a well-specialized site with PR 4 already can hold steadily number one position on all major keywords in Google and Yahoo searches. If your home page got a modest PR 0-2, dont sweat. It is just a stimulus for further improvement of your site. Writing and posting articles in ezines and blogs, building high quality content on your site and growing number of inbound links from other sites of the same specialization is the best thing that you can do to improve your pages PR.

So good luck on your PR!

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