Where Does PageRank Originate From?

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PageRank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As for the green bar, don't believe it. A) It's only a coarse approximation of the actual PageRank, and B) it's almost guaranteed to be out of date.

Pagerank .... heard the term, or, paid attention to it after a long time. I do not worry about PR anymore. There used to be time when achieving higher pagerank was in everyone's check list.

btw, no idea, where it came from ... maybe another stork? :rolleyes:

While only Google knows the exact algorithm for PageRank, the Wikipedia page does have plenty of info.

If I understand your original question, it can be summarized as:

How do pages get high PR if there aren't other pages with high PR?

Simple answer is backlinks. Lots and lots of them.

According to the original PR patent, Google also takes into consideration the "quality" and "authority" of the page the link is coming from. So in theory, the page a link is coming from is a PR0, but still passes on some juice towards the PR value of the linked page.

The answer to where PageRank originates from is contained in the original algorithm posted on Wikipedia, but not everyone is into math so here's a simple answer in layman's terms - with a bit of extra stuff to help illuminate the key concept:

Every new document that is placed on the web brings a small amount of additional PageRank to the web - every page has a seed value.

The algorithm is then run to see where all that PageRank goes - by following links. The way the algorithm follows links is now a lot more complicated than the original way it worked, but the same basic principals still apply.

One of the implications of this, that a lot of people ignore, is that sites with large amounts of pages generate a lot of PageRank internally - just by having a lot of pages. The algorithm that Google now uses passes less juice internally within a site, and less within a network of sites with the same ownership (wherever Google can work that out) than it used to, but every new document on a site still adds to the total net PR of that site, and any network of sites that it links to (this is why private blog networks hide the fact they are networks - to get more link juice from their network of sites).

This was a large part of the reason that the Panda algorithm was introduced - to stop Content Farms from using their massive amounts of internally generated PageRank to easily rank low quality content in the SERPs - basically Google said (these are my words - just paraphrasing) "if you can't maintain the quality, then we will apply a site wide filter that will lower the ranking of all your pages, not just the low quality ones, because you're using low quality pages to generate link juice in order to rank pages that don't deserve to be in the SERPs".

If you would like to get a better feel for how PageRank works, and where it comes from, try playing with this calculator which uses the original algorithm to show how PR flows within a network of up to 50 documents: markhorrell.com/tools/pagerank.html

Others have already commented on other aspects of your post but I can verify that this is indeed true. One of my site got one link from a PR7 site and was PR4 in a mere few weeks while one of my 15 year old site took 10 years to get to PR3 and has stayed there despite having thousands of links all gained organically as during those days I had no clue about link building.

Where does Page Rank originate from? Mountain View, CA of course.

Interesting question.
Google takes all the webpages in its index and puts those with the most link values at the top and those with no links at the bottom. PageRank is allocated on a logarithmic scale. If it is to a base rate 10, for every page with PR10 there would be 100 with PR8 and 10,000 with PR6 etc.

Hope this helps

David