What Is PageRank And How It Is Calculated? (2023)

What Is PageRank?

You must consider different SEO metrics as a creator to know how your webpage is performing. One of them is PageRank. Many users don’t even know what is PageRank and its essential role in SEO metrics. Perhaps this is why PageRank is rarely mentioned anywhere to measure a webpage’s growth. However, this blog will explain to you what is PageRank and how you can calculate it to estimate your website’s growth.

What Is A Pagerank For A Webpage?

pagerank

Pagerank is an algorithm developed by Google. It is one of the significant algorithms used by Google to rank web pages on the search engine. Pagerank is designed to access the authority of web pages. The higher the number of backlinking, outbound links, and interlinking you have from the authoritative page, the more preference your webpage gets from the search engines. This means that whenever a query is searched related to your niche and your web content, the chances of your site appearing on the search engine result page (SERP) increases.

How Are Pagerank Calculated?

Google usually calculates Pagerank based on the number and the quality of backlinks and outbound links a webpage contains. Here’s the mathematical formula for calculating the page rank of the webpage.

PR(A) = (1‑d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

This equation, T1 to Tn, is represented as all pages linking to page A. C is the number of outbound links, and d is the damping factor. For people who do not know the damping factor, this is the possibility of the person continuously following links that were randomly clicked before.

How To Check Google Page Rank?

The only way to check the page ranking of your webpage is by using Google page rank checker or others available online. Listed below are some of the top 10 best web page rank checkers.

  • SmallSeotools
  • Check PageRank
  • Duplichecker
  • Sitechecker
  • DNS Checker
  • Searchenginereports.net
  • Ahrefs
  • prchecker.info
  • The HOTH
  • Google Tools

Accumulating inbound links from the authoritative page is significant as the links from the webpage with lower ranking scores will hinder your page ranking score. This is one of the reasons why Google gives preference to other webpages than yours.

Which Of The Following Factors Have An Impact On The Google Pagerank?

Since we know the importance of inbound links in SEO PageRank, it’s time to look through some other factors beyond that. It will give detailed insights into your page and help you discover unknown factors that influence your page rank.

Factors That Have An Impact On The Google Pagerank

1. Anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink that provides context about the linked web pages. According to Google’s original paper, Anchor text has a crucial influence on a page’s ranking as it describes the webpage better than the page itself. Suppose you had a page about eco-friendly carpets; the authoritative pages used the exact term as anchor text. This would have increased your page ranking score.

Ensure to audit the inbound links you get from the pages and see if they have used the exact term as anchor text to their page. If they haven’t, it is advised to get rid of those links.

2. The Probability Of A Link Being Clicked

The PageRank algorithm allotted equal weights to each link the webpage contains. Whereas, Google patent says that not all links should be provided equal weight as some links are more likely to get clicks, but some aren’t. So the links that have clicks should have more weightage than the others, which also impacts your page ranking score.

3. Internal Links

Internal links are the links you add to your content from your website. This is another powerful SEO tactic to increase the ranking score of your page. Through interlinking, you let PageRank walk through your site and drive authority to orphaned pages that aren’t interlinked anywhere.

4. Nofollow links

Web pages with nofollow links don’t pass the PageRank. So if you are writing webpage content with multiple links and do “nofollow” all the links except one, the ranking score of that webpage will only increase. Earlier, SEO used the nofollow attribute to sculpt the page rank flow, also known as “PageRank sculpting.”

Conclusion

Now that you know what is PageRank, remember that auditing your backlinks is critical to know if your page has links from a lower-ranked webpage or spam sites. Inbound links can do both, build your domain authority or ruin it completely. For that reason, you must practice link building, as it is one of the best SEO strategies to increase page rank.

Author avatar
Shivani Rai