Introducing PageRank

In a nutshell, PageRank (PR) deals with the quantity of incoming links and their relative strength. When one page links to another, it “casts a vote” for that page in the form of a numeric PageRank value.


In general, the more links you have that point to your site the better, as this increases the PageRank score of the page being linked to. This is also sometimes called link popularity. However, the amount of PageRank value these links can “forward” on to your site, and hence the amount that is used in the Google PageRank calculation, is diluted by the presence of other links on the same page. This is where link strength comes into play.


The greater the number of other links on a page, the weaker the strength of each individual link. Each link is essentially a “vote” for the page being linked to, and the strength of that “vote” is divided equally among all other links on the page. Which means, all other things being equal, if someone has a link to your site on their page with 100 other links, you won’t get any appreciable value from that link in the overall calculation, UNLESS the page has a very high PageRank score. Confused? All will be explained in the next chapter!

So What is Link Quality?

Google tries to return the most relevant results for a given search. One way Google does so is by searching for and analyzing keywords on pages of other websites that link to your site. What other sites “say” about your site through their link text, the title of their Links page, and the content of their Links page can be almost as important as what your own web pages say! This means that the quality of links may be as important as the quantity of links to your site.

You could have hundreds of pages linking to your site, but if the text of those links doesn’t match your keywords, or if the linking page content is not related to your site, those links by themselves probably won’t add any appreciable boost to your ranking.