subject: What is the Significance of Google Page Rank? [print this page] What is the Significance of Google Page Rank?
Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. The importance of each vote taken into account when the Page Rank of a page is calculated is something that has to be determined very clearly. Page Rank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
Page Rank is the life line of Google. Without it, the search engine will not be able to congregate all the data in the world and then rank the websites according to the data they display. People are very finicky about linking relevant content and pages with more links to them are usuallybetter resources than pages that nobody links. Page rank helps them accomplish this task.
Page Rank doesn't stop there. It also looks at the importance of the page that contains the link. Pages with higher Page Rank have more weight in "voting" with their links than pages with lower Page Rank. It also looks at the number of links on the page casting the "vote." Pages with more links have less weight. This also makes a certain amount of sense. Pages that are important are probably better authorities in leading web surfers to better sources, and pages that have more links are likely to be less discriminating on where they're linking.
Page Rank is one of many factors that determine where your web page appears in search result ranking, but if all other factors are equal, Page Rank can have significant impact on your Google rankings.
