How does Google rank your web page?
When Google ranks your site, it looks for two things – authority and relevancy (relevance for our UK readers). What does this mean? You’re about to find out.
Authority
As humans, we instinctively appreciate that if we read something on the CNN or BBC websites, it’s more likely to be true that if we read it in some random blog. The reason is that these are authoritative sites and we have trust in their veracity. In fact, you could visit any site on the web and get a feel for how reliable it is. You’d look for brands you recognized and you’d look at the feel of the site and quality of the content.
Google knows this and also knows it matters. If you search for something, Google’s business depends on being able to return a correct and reliable answer. If you searched “when is Justin Bieber’s birthday”, you’d need the answer to be correct; otherwise, you’d miss that festive day. (1st March, 1994, to save you the trouble). So over the years, Google has had to codify something that humans can generally do instinctively.
Google does this by assuming that people link to sites they trust, find interesting or offer them something. Thinking about your own web usage, you’ll probably see that this is true.
Page Rank
Google takes all these links and assigns the site a number between 1 and 10, where 1 is the least authoritative and 10 is the most. This system is called PageRank after the founder, Larry Page. (A note of caution, this is an oversimplification – there are some more factors used to calculate Page Rank, but the general truth still holds. The more links a site has, the higher its Page Rank will be). Page Rank is a key ranking factor, so website owners are always looking to get more people linking to their site. We call this ‘link building’ and at Word tracker, we talk about it a lot.
One more thing to say about Page Rank. It’s an exponential scale, so going from 1 to 2 is easier than going from 3 to 4, which in turn is easier than going from 5 to 6 and so on up to 10. There are just 11 sites which have a Page Rank of 10 (or PR10).
Source: Wordtracker
