General FAQ's |
| What is My PageRank?
Google PageRank is Google’s way of assessing the relative quality of a Web site or Web page on the Internet. PageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 10. The stronger the PageRank of a given Web page, the higher the corresponding score on the scale. My Google PageRank allows Webmasters to view their site's PageRank online. In addition, Webmasters can use the provided code from the My Google Page Rank tool to display their site's PageRank to their visitors.. How can I find out my Google PageRank? The primary method of finding out a Web page's PageRank is to install the Google Toolbar. The Page Rank (PR) is displayed in a small green PR gauge on the Google Toolbar. The Google toolbar can be downloaded for Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. The Google Toolbar also shows a number of each page's backlinks, but is not considered a true measure of current PageRank. As of the time these FAQs were written, there is no Google Toolbar currently available for Mac users. The visible PageRank is one portion of the true PageRank valuation that Google maintains. The toolbar display can be inaccurate when attempting to assess a page's relative importance.. In addition to the Google Toolbar, tools such as My Google PageRank allow Webmasters to find a site's PR by simply entering their site's URL into an online form. The Webmaster can then paste a small portion of provided HTML code into their Web pages to display their site's PageRank to all their visitors. This provides useful information about the site to its visitors - without the visitors having to install the Google Toolbar.. Is the PageRank (PR) number for the entire site or individual pages? PageRank is determined for each specific Web page (document). Every page on your website very likely has a different PR. A given site's home page probably has the highest PR, since it probably has the most sites linking to it. Each internal page may have a different Google PageRank. Sometimes, the PageRank for an informative and popular article on an internal page of a Web site will be higher than that of the site’s home page.. How is PageRank calculated? PageRank is determined based on both the number and quality of the links pointing to a given Web page or document. The higher the PR of a page's backlinks, and the fewer outward-pointing links there are on a Webpage, the more PageRank (PR) is allocated to that Web page. For example, a Web page with a fairly high Google PageRank of 6, but that has many outbound links, might pass along much less PageRank than a PR4 page with only several outbound links. This is just a very basic assessment though. The actual number of variables in calculating PageRank (PR) is simply too high for easy computation.. Does each and every inbound link contribute to the overall total? PageRank can be compared to a form of voting. A link to a given Webpage can be thought of as a vote for that page. Some documents with higher PageRank are viewed by Google as more important. The "votes" from pages with high Page Rank are given greater importance by Google - much more importance in some cases. Overall, the more inbound links pointing to a specific Web site, the stronger the PageRank will be. Many people interpret PageRank as a quantitative measure of link popularity. Does the number of links from a page make a difference? The total number of outbound links from a page does contribute to the amount of PageRank transferred to each receiving page. A Web page with twenty outbound links sends one twentieth of the total available PageRank flow to the receiving page. A document linking to only one other document sends all of the available PageRank transfer to the next Web page. Is it important to have good PageRank? Yes, because PageRank is one part of the Google algorithm that determines where your blog or website will appear in the search engine results. Higher PR pages, especially for competitive keywords, will often be listed higher, but high PageRank is only one of an estimated one hundred contributing factors in Google's algorithm. PageRank (PR) should not be considered the most important factor in search engine rankings. Quality content and relevant links are of utmost importance, but PageRank is certainly an important factor to take into consideration. How do I update my listing? Our crawler automatically updates your listing. Your listing is based on the Meta Tags you have provided in the <head> section of your homepage. For more information on Meta Tags see that question below. What are Meta Tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. What is Google Sitemaps? Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your web server, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Who can use Google Sitemaps? Google Sitemaps is intended for all site owners, from those with a single webpage to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If either of the following is true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps: * You want Google to crawl more of your pages. * You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes. What are Meta Tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. How do I impliment Meta Tags? Meta tags are easy to impliment. Open your homepage in some sort of HTML editor, or even notepad will do. Here are two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth: <head>
In the example above, you can see the beginning of
the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown
as /HEAD. Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown
in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS
tag. Let's talk about what these do. Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed). In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, not just for us, but because it gives you some degree of control with various other crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content. So to use the meta keywords tag... look back at the opening example. See the second meta tag shown, the one that says "name=keywords"? That's the meta keywords tag. The keywords you want associated with your page go between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag. Inktomi says that you should include up to 25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas. More advice from Inktomi can be found on its Content Policy FAQ. Let's say you have a page about horseback riding, and you've written your page
using "horseback" as a single word. You realize that some people may instead
search for "horse back riding," with "horse back" in their searches being two
separate words. If you listed these words separately in your meta keywords tag,
THEN MAYBE FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, your page might rank better for
"horse back" riding. Sadly, the best way to ensure this would be to write your
pages using both "horseback riding" and "horse back riding" in the text -- or
perhaps on some of your pages, use the single word version and on others, the
two word version. |