Paul De Sousa

A layman’s guide to Google’s PageRank and why a high PageRank is crucial to the success of a dynamic content website.

The Google PageRank is a system that was deployed by Google to rank web pages by an importance factor, called PageRank. This is a rank that is given to a page and not the entire site. Many sites have a range of different ranks across all their pages.

It is factored on a scale from 0 – 10 where 0 is of least importance and 10 being the highest. Every search engine enthusiast the world over strives to get a site’s pages to its highest possible ranking which is PageRank 10.

A PageRank 10 is the Holy Grail of the search engine world, and less than 50 websites on the internet can brag about having pages being a PageRank 10.
A website can have more than 1 PageRank 10 page but the recognition is given to the entire site.

A page’s PageRank is loosely based on the amount of other websites that point to that page, although the algorithm is a lot more complex than that, bringing into consideration the type of incoming links as well as whether the links can be judged as “authoritative”.
Articles and papers published by science and medical journals the world over are measured in importance based on how many other articles and papers reference them. An article by a well known writer or scientist or mathematician that makes reference to another article often lends a lot more credibility to the referenced article.
PageRank works on the exact same principle, where if a web page that has a Google PageRank points to another webpage, the second page is seeing as being important too because of the important page that is pointing to it.

PageRank cannot be bought. It cannot be traded, sold, bought, deleted, given away or shared. Many believe that one can pay Google to allow a site to have a PR10.
This is NOT possible.

PageRank is the foremost reflection of how important a site is based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to that page.

PageRank may fluctuate and often decrease over time if the resident SEO specialist within a company neglects the site.

Another common misconception is that a higher PageRank dictates that content pages will list higher in serps. This is NOT TRUE and a very common SEO myth.

While PageRank is a tool to determine the importance of a page, the biggest benefit of a high PageRank is that frequency of spider visits to that page to seek new content is relative to the PageRank. I.e. the higher the PageRank of a page, the more frequent Google’s Googlebot will return to the page. Although an undocumented perception is that Googlebot works out its own frequency pattern based on the amount of fresh content it finds with each visit.

In other words, the more fresh content is served on your website, the higher the frequency of the bot visit.

Process

• Googlebot crawls a page and returns the content to the index
• Googlebot returns to the page a few days later (determined by PageRank) to check for more content, if it finds nothing new, it will return a week later.
• If it finds new content on the 3rd visit, it then determines that content is being updated only once every X amount of days. (X = period of inactivity between first Googlebot visit + the amount of days until the next content update)
• If the last visit was 14 days ago and the Googlebot finds new content on its return, it will then return 13 days later to try and determine a fresh content schedule. If new content is found in that time, it will return again in 12 days until it manages to calculate an almost exact rate of frequency that fresh content is served on the page.
• The reverse also applies. The 1st time the Googlebot visits a page, it will return to that page based on the frequency schedule determined by the page’s PageRank.
• If it returns in 6 days and finds fresh content, it will return in 5 days, then 4 then 3 to try and determine how often fresh content is being served. However the Googlebot may not increase its own frequency to exceed the frequency of visits that are determined by the page’s PageRank.
• It takes approximately 2 weeks to get all content served across all Google’s Data centers. (Google have more than 1 server which house the contents of their indexes, these are known as data centers)

What is the significance of having a high PageRank?

The very best reason for having a high PageRank is because a site with a high PageRank will have its content listed on Google much quicker than other sites with lower PR ranking pages.

The following scenario explains the benefit of having high PageRank:
• A new item makes world news, e.g. Terrorists bomb Eifel Tower in Paris.
• Millions of internet users turn to search engines to find the latest news on this event and thus turn to Google and seek out the relevant news.
• As the news is being updated onto news sites, those sites with a higher PageRank get their stories into Google before others.
CNN has a PageRank of 9
FoxNews has a PageRank of 7

• Because CNN has a higher PageRank, their news can be found on Google in less than 6 hours.
• While news published on FoxNews will be found only after 2 or 3 days.

While many people do not really care that a site’s articles aren’t featuring in a search engine, they fail to realize that a site loses the possibility of gaining new visitors and thus have to rely on its loyal members and readers to sustain its self.
Sites that have more unique visitors have the ability to charge more for their advertising real estate inventory.

Which site would draw a lot more new visitors? One that has a low PageRank and whose content is only being indexed by search a month later after the news has already gone cold? Or a site whose content is listed in Google within the hour?

PageRank Schedule
While there is no exact listing of any schedule, the following is an estimated listing of each PageRank and its approximated associated frequency.

PageRank Approximate Frequency
PR0 30 days
PR1 30 Days
PR2 20 Days
PR3 14 Days
PR4 10 Days
PR5 7 Days
PR6 4 Days
PR7 2 Days
PR8 12-24 Hours
PR9 4-6 Hours
PR10 1-2 Hours

Normally new sites that are given a PR of 0 once found by Googlebot are crawled consistently till all content is spidered. Then Googlebot will then return approximately once a month.
However, there are a number of SEO tips and tricks to induce an overlap causing the Googlebot to index a site on a nearly daily basis.

Summary
In short, the Google PageRank is without a doubt a very important factor which will helpany site website become a formidable force.
To raise PageRank will take a lengthy campaign of up to 36 months.
There is no guarantee of getting a high PageRank in a short space of time, many webmasters have struggled for more than 4 years to obtain PageRank 8, however a plan of action can be put together to gain optimal leverage in obtaining a reasonable PageRank in a relatively shorter space of time (12-18 months for PageRank 6 or 7) and I will write a follow up to this which delves deeper into linkbuilding and rasing PR