subject: Pagerank- Website Sorting Techonology From Google [print this page] If you have your own website, it is good to understand how Search Engines work when returning results. In my opinion, Google is the best Search Engine as it returns the most relevant results. By knowing how the system works, you can improve the position in which your website is returned within the results.
Allegedly there are currently around 150,000,000 websites active on the Internet and, as such, getting them in to any kind of order isn't a particularly easy job. In order to catalogue websites in to their database the search engines employ the use of computer programs known as 'spiders' which follow links from one website to another, documenting pages as they go. When you perform a search they refer back to this database of pages and return a series of results by matching your query with text stored on the pages title, content, URL, image text or even in the META tags; this is something which is only normally visible by Search Engines, it is code that is programmed in to the page.
The results are sorted in an order based on a specific algorithm that the Search Engine has chosen to employ; as such a website won't rank the same over every engine for the same keywords. Whilst I have oversimplified the process, the concept in theory doesn't usually get a huge amount more complicated than this.
Google is a little different however as they have patented a technology known as PageRank which provides another important element to this algorithm by assigning a score as to how important they believe a page to be in the wider context of things. Typically a page with a high PageRank will rank higher in the search results than one a lower scoring site.
Counting the number of other websites that link to a site is one of the ways that Google establishes a PageRank; each link to the site is counted as a vote towards its overall 'importance' with they theory being this being that a high quality site would usually have more people linking to it than a mediocre one.
Not all votes are considered equal however; a link from a high ranking website for example will carry more clout than one from a low ranking website so if a webdesigner creates a thousand empty websites and gets them to link back to his main site then it won't artificially increase his ranking. The quality of the vote will also be determined by a number of other factors such as the amount of links a specific website has already extended; it probably isn't particularly valuable to link to a link farm that also links to 50,000 other sites.
If you do happen to run a website and are looking to increase your visibility on Google then I can't really go wrong in suggesting that you fill your site with a large amount of useful, interesting and unique content and then work on obtaining links from as many relevant sources as you can; usually these can be obtained for free by simply asking. Hopefully, both your PageRank and flow of visitors will improve because of having these links.
If you want to check up on the PageRank of a particular site then download and install the free Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.co.uk.
