What is Your Website's Page Rank?

Google's robots crawl over 3.8 million websites in the world and measure link popularity based on search terms. Web sites are then given a "rank" between 0 and 10 and when a search is conducted, the site with the highest rank wins.

What is A Google Page Rank?
Google uses a sophisticated algorithm for given search terms which are linked by other reputable sites (measured by how many sites link to them, in a never-ending cycle of reputation measurement). Those sites are then given a "rank" between 0 and 10. The more a website page matches the keyword search algorithm, the higher the "rank" assigned to that page. (Ranks of 7+ are rarely seen on smaller websites. Those numbers are usually reserved for the big sites such as Google, AOL, MSN, etc.) So, optimizing your site for specific keywords increases your chance of receiving a higher "rank" and for your site to show up at the top of the search list.

PageRank as Explained By Google

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."

Why doesn't my site show up?
If you conduct a search for your website's url and it does not show up in Google's search results, then your site most likely has not been indexed yet. It could be because there aren't enough other pages on the internet that link to your site. If you conduct a search for a certain keyword or phrase and it does not show up, then your site most likely has not been optimized properly.

What about Alexa?
Google measures link popularity based on search terms. Alexa measures website popularity based on visits to the website. How many visitors does your website get and how often do they visit? In 1996, Alexa created programming that follows users around the internet to determine just that. By adding Alexa to a browser's toolbar, websites can be ranked according to the number of times users have visited that site in the past six months. Since 1999, both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator have included Alexa programming in their tool sets.

Where to next?