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Google's PageRank system uses the Web's vast link structure as an indicator of a webpage's value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote for page B, by page A.
Aside from the number of links a page receives, Google 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."
PageRank is measured on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 is the highest.
Important sites receive a higher PageRank. However, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. As such Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to a search query.
No. Google allocates each webpage that it has crawled and indexed an individual PageRank rating. It is possible for a subpage to have a higher PageRank rating than the website's homepage.
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Google interprets inbound links as a vote for the page by the page linking to it. Links from pages that are themselves "important" (i.e. have a higher PageRank) weigh more heavily than those with a lower PageRank.
Therefore, the best way to increase PageRank is to get as many websites, especially ones with a higher PageRank, to links to yours as possible.
The more links your pages receives, the higher its PageRank rating is likely to be. And the higher your webpage's PageRank rating, the higher your rankings in Google are likely to be.
No one can buy a higher PageRank. Google does not sell placement within the search results themselves. However, you may buy small text ads with the Google AdWords program that are placed above and next to the search results.
PageRank is passed onto a webpage if the page with the outbound link uses HTML code that has a direct link to the link destination.
For example:
<a href="http://www.google.com">Outbound Link</a>PageRank is not passed on if the link doesn't point directly to the link destination. Examples of links that don't point directly to the link destination include most affiliate links, traffic tracking links, links that point to a webpage on the same website as the outbound link which then redirects the user to the link destination (this is often used to hide the real URL of the website it is linking to), and so on.
Other links that don't help increase PageRank are links from webpages that either has a PageRank rating of zero (for example, new webpages), or doesn't have a PageRank rating because Google's spider cannot crawl and index it. These include dynamically generated pages, such as search engine results pages (including paid inclusion pages), online databases, and password protected pages.
Adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to a hyperlink instructs search engine spiders not to crawl the link. The attribute was introduced in 2005 to help combat blog comment spam. The organizations that support the technique include, Blogger, blojsom, Blosxom, Buzznet, Flickr, Google, MSN (MSN Search, MSN Spaces), Scripting News, Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal), WordPress, Yahoo! Search.
For example the following link:
<a href="http://www.google.com">This is a great site</a>Becomes:
<a href="http://www.donotfollow.com" rel="nofollow">I link to this site, but I'm not endorsing it</a>Be wary of websites trying to deprive you of PageRank by including the rel="nofollow" attribute in their link to your site.
PageRank leakage is the theory that every outbound link reduces a proportional amount of PageRank that each link passes on. Therefore, some search engine optimizers try to funnel PageRank by including the rel="nofollow" attribute in outbound links where they don't want PageRank to be passed on.
That depends on where you stand in the argument. We know that the rel="nofollow" attribute was introduced by the search engines to help combat blog comment spam. i.e. Stop PageRank being passed onto sites that post links in blog comments. It is also a fact that search engines use mathematical algorithms to calculate PageRank and rank webpages.
I'm not a mathematician, and I don't understand most of the mathematical calculations that other experts have presented. But PageRank leakage seems logical to me. After all, if the reason for using the rel="nofollow" attribute is to cap PageRank being passed on, then I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that there's more PageRank being distributed by the other links on the page that don't contain the rel="nofollow" attribute.
Yes! Google recommend that you avoid linking to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
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