Affiliate Marketing Resources

 Google Page Rank

Whenever you talk about your website with a serious SEO guy the 1st question he (or she) is going to ask is "what is the page rank?", so what's all the fuss about?.

In it's simplest terms page rank is a term coined by the founders of Google which assigns a score between 0 and 10 to a page, there's two important points to immediately make here:

• The score is for the page, not the website, page rank is a page scoring system not a website scoring system, every page in a website has it's own page rank
• You may think that 0 is the lowest rank that you can have, but no, there's also a rank called "null" which basically means that your web page is not good enough to even be assigned a number from 0 to 10

The other two major search engines (Yahoo and MSN) do not have an equivalent ranking system that is so visibly open to the public, but I'm sure they have something similar internally.

The way most SEO and internet marketers monitor their own page rank and that go their competitors is by using the Google tool bar, you can download this from Google and it sits at the top of your browser. It will automatically show you what the page rank is for whatever page you currently are viewing (make sure that you have the page rank option enabled in the tool bar.

Page rank is important because it is a public display of what Google thinks of your site in terms of:

• Popularity - how many other sites link to you
• The quality of your content - very unique content will inevitability get you a higher page rank
• How well your site is designed and constructed
• How pure or "white hat" your site is
• And there's many others some of which are not known

The benefit of a good page rank is that generally speaking the higher the rank the higher your pages will appear in the search listings, so it's good to have a high score.

It's important to know that even though it is well known how page rank is calculated, more or less, it's based on the links and their page rank linking to your site, how many and exactly where they link to, the Google algorithm that actually determines your listing position is pretty much top secret.

Although the Google listing algorithm is a well guarded secret, and constantly evolving, many of the key factors are know and the subject of much testing by SEO experts.