Articles - Page Rank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. In other words it can be shown that the PageRank of a page is the probability of being at that page after lots of clicks. For example, a newly built website will have a page rank of 0 because the probability that a surfer on the net will click a link to that site is zero. This is because, since it is not linking to any site or search engine, it is taken that no surfer will get to know the existence of the site, until it is popular enough. The PageRank theory holds that even an imaginary surfer who is randomly clicking on links will eventually stop clicking. In fact, page rank shows how popular and important a particular page is . In Google's other search services (such as its primary Web search) PageRank is used to weight the relevance scores of pages shown in search results

The concept of how pages are ranked are much complicated than they appears. Since they are full of mathematical algorithm. Not only that, each search engine has got something to hide as far as page ranking is concern. Especially when it comes to how they see a site as important so that those linking to it might get higher page rank. But the simple method is this; page ranking is more or less like balloting in a vote and also selecting a top official. Each site linking to your site, usually called the incoming link adds to your sites popularity and hence your page rank. It is like each site linking to you is sharing its page rank with your. This means the higher the page rank of the site linking to you the higher your page rank too. The value of the link-votes that counts to your page rank is divided among all the outbound (out going) links on a page linking to you. The algorithm governing page rank suggest that, a site had more incoming links to outgoing links to increase it page rank. This is where one way links were invented to get rid of out going links.
If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.
Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. Google itself rank 10 whilst the next popular search engine yahoo is ranked 9.

While the PR shown in the Toolbar is considered to be derived from an accurate PageRank value (at some time prior to the time of publication by Google) for most sites, it must be noted that this value is also easily manipulated. A current flaw is that any low PageRank page that is redirected, via a 302 server header or a "Refresh" meta tag, to a high PR page causes the lower PR page to acquire the PR of the destination page. In theory a new, PR0 page with no incoming links can be redirected to the Google home page - which is a PR 10 - and by the next PageRank update the PR of the new page will be upgraded to a PR10. This spoofing technique, also known as 302 Google Jacking, is a known failing or bug in the system. Any page's PR can be spoofed to a higher or lower number of the webmaster's choice and only Google has access to the real PR of the page. Spoofing is generally detected by running a Google search for a URL with questionable PR, as the results will display the URL of an entirely different site (the one redirected to) in its results.

"rel='nofollow'" - Don't add to my page rank

In early 2005, Google implemented a new value, "nofollow", for the rel attribute of HTML link and anchor elements, so that website builders and bloggers can make links that Google will not consider for the purposes of PageRank — they are links that no longer constitute a "vote" in the PageRank system. The nofollow relationship was added in an attempt to help combat spamdexing.

As an example, people could create many message-board posts with links to their website to artificially inflate their PageRank. Now, however, the message-board administrator can modify the code to automatically insert "rel='nofollow'" to all hyperlinks in posts, thus preventing PageRank from being affected by those particular posts. ® wikipedia.org

INCREASING YOUR PAGE RANK

As said above, it can be noticed that incoming links to more important and relevant pages is what increases your page rank. These are some of the legal ways you can increase your page rank. Whilst pages with high ranks are anxious to include or exchange links with the onces with lower ranks, pages with low ranking are always eager to increase theirs instead of being comfortable at where they are. This makes high rank pages stays where they are whilst low ones keeps increasing over a period of some months. You can use the following strategies to boost yours:

Link to pages with high rank
Include reciprocal link exchange on your page where people can link to you and you in exchange link to them. For example, this site have the link to us and links page where it exchanges links with others.
Try One way links as far as possible. If it is convenient for you, you can pay for the one way link industry to link your site to others without you linking back.
Use link exchange. If the above is not convenient to you, you can make use of the free link exchange services where you can exchange link with thousands of sites. Whilst some of these use unnatural linking, many uses natural linking method where members request to exchange links with you personally.
Since its all about website linking to increase page rank, you can get more tips in the article: website linking