Understanding Google Pagerank

Google updated their page ranks of web pages on April 1st (five days ago). For those who don’t understand what is a pagerank, it is an algorithm that Google uses to measure how important a web page is by using the amount and quality of links that are linking to the web page. The higher your page rank, the more trust (not ranking) Google gives to you on their search engine. This is mostly true for sites that have PR 6 – PR 10. It is because it is hard to get those PR values.

I thought it was an April fool’s joke. But I thought, why would Google joke with webmasters like that. I saw the page rank (PR) update on my SEO toolbar. I thought my toolbar was messing with me. I went to the digitalpoint forums to check if there was any threads on PR update and there was a thread. This blog didn’t have any change. It still maintained its PR 4 ranking. I wish it ranked higher.

If anybody is following the news about the threat of the conficker virus/worm, computer experts said that the virus was scheduled to receive new information on April 1st. I was concerned because I don’t want my pc to be affected by the virus. I visited a web page that Microsoft made that was dedicated to protecting yourself from the conficker virus. If you look at the page, you would see that it was created on a April 1st. I don’t know if that site is a blog. I was trying to find out if it has an archive. I could not see anything. So I assume it is a website.

Since I have the SEO toolbar installed on my firefox browser, I look at almost every website that I visit. I noticed that the Microsoft conficker virus page had a PR 6. I was shocked because how can a page that was created within hours of Google’s page rank update have a PR 6 while blogs that have been around for more than 3 years cannot break the PR 4 barrier. Since the site is part of Microsoft website, I can say the link came from Microsoft. Microsoft homepage is PR 9.

Nobody except Google’s employees knows how Google’s page rank system work. The information you read online about Google’s page rank are what Google wants us to believe, or that is speculation from other webmasters.