So what is Page Rank?
Well, let’s ask Goggle, who actually has a trademark on the term PageRank. Page rank looks at a site’s vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Essentially, Google interprets a link from page 1 to page 2 as a vote in page rank regard. Not content with simply counting “votes” that a page happens to receive, Google also analyzes the page that casts the vote, meaning page 2 in the above example. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links, and other factors, such as the relevance of search words on a page, and actual page hits also have some influence on Google’s page ranking system.
So when should you check for page ranking?
Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google.
Other link-based ranking algorithms for Web pages include the HITS algorithm invented by Jon Kleinberg (used by Teoma and now Ask.com), the IBM CLEVER project, and the TrustRank algorithm.
After you’ve submitted your site to search engines, it may take several weeks for search engine searches to yield favored results. Sometimes, it may even take several submissions before you get registered. The best way to see if you’ve gotten indexed is to plug in your URL into your favorite search engine. Once you do get indexed, then it’s a matter of applying search optimization principles to start moving up the chain of page rankings.
One specific note in regards to Google rankings. Some people spend time optimizing their sites, then are confused when they can’t see any significant changes in Google ranking after their changes. Google uses a specific algorithm which may be a reason. In most cases, when a person does a query for a keyword, Google calculates the sequence of pages in the results list using this algorithm, then filters those results so that no more than two pages from the same site is displayed. Therefore, you might show up in Google results on page three – but you could either be page #3 or #11. As well, Google resequences results so that they present two pages that would otherwise appear on the same results page as an indented, in sequence, result. That means that if two results from the same site show up on the same page, let’s say page three as in the above example, the second result could actually be on page four or further down the list.