Many people misunderstand the issue of Google Page Rank. For those who don’t know, it is a ranking Google gives to every individual page it indexes. It varies page to page; your home page may have a PR of 4, but a secondary page may have a PR of 2…or even visa versa sometimes.

You can see the page rank of every page you visit by installing the Google Toolbar. After installing it, you must manually enable the Page Rank feature in the bar. Be aware that the toolbar is only updated by Google every 3 or 4 months. Therefore, the PR displayed may not be the same PR Google actually has listed for your site at any given time.

PR for a given page is based upon how many backlinks there are to that page. Additionally, the quality of those backlinks plays a significant role in the rankings. Even a site’s own internal linking has a positive effect on PR. In most cases a dozen or so directory type backlinks, along with a good internal linking strategy between a site’s own pages will eventually result in a PR of 1 or 2.

All things being equal, a higher PR is better than a lower PR. However, a page with a higher PR will not necessarily insure it ranks higher in a Google search than a page with lower PR. In fact, it happens all the time that a low PR page will outrank a higher PR page for a given keyword.

How can this happen? It’s all about relevance. If a page is optimized better for a given keyword, then chances are it will rank higher than a page which is not optimized as well even if the poorly optimized page has higher PR. This can be especially true when long tail keywords are concerned. Again, it’s all about how relevant a given page is for a given keyword…according to Google. Page Rank is only one factor in the search result rankings.

A side note about PR:

The rankings are based on an algorithmic scale. Take for example a page which has a PR of 3. Moving that page to a PR of 4 means increasing the page’s “link juice” by a factor of 10. Each singular increase in PR represents a ten fold increase in back link quality and/or quantity. This factor is why it is very difficult and rare for pages to ever obtain PR’s of 7 and higher.

The moral of the Page Rank story is not to worry a lot about it. Long tail keywords are most important for smaller/newer sites. PR only plays a small role in determining the success of a well optimized niche site.

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