Page Rank Demystified

4th July 2007

Jim Boykins Internet marketing blog has a great article about getting your pages out of the supplemental index using your own internal linking structure. In the article, he gives the mathematical formula for Google PageRank -

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)

Does it finally makes sense now? Okay, this is really a lot simpler than it looks…

• Every web page with PageRank gives a little way a little bit of what I call “link juice” with every outbound link on the page.
• Each page can give away a total of only 85% of its overall link juice, so use it wisely, and don’t waste it.
• The more outbound links you have one a webpage, the less link juice each one gets.

Once you understand the concept of PageRank as link juice and concede that you only have so much juice to go around, it all starts making more sense, as you design and build your websites, and especially as you give out links to different areas of your own site and others.

If you have a decent sized site, and several different pages with better PageRank, then by refocusing your link juice, you should be able to bounce anything out of supplementals yourself, and better allocate your own Page Rank.

To do this intelligently, Jim offers pretty clear instructions in the article, and it’s well worth the time for you to read it, to better understand the concept of how PageRank flows.

In the article he also gives a link to a great tool from his company that helps you quickly identify which pages on your website have the most linked used to go around. He calls it the powerful sub page tool and while it seems great in concept, it was a little buggy this morning, returning pages not found. I’ll have to check it tomorrow…