I've heard Google's algorithm is based on PageRank, and that it has something to do with the links to your site. Can someone explain it, and more importantly, how I can increase my site's PageRank?

  • If you want to appear higher in search results, you might want to increase your TrustRank instead. It affects your position much more than PR does.
    – Evgeny
    Nov 1 '10 at 1:31
  • Care to cite any sources that demonstrate that?
    – John Conde
    Nov 29 '10 at 19:27
  • As of 2015, PageRank can only be measured as to where you land on SERP and even that might be suspect as Google gathers data on your search history. Google no longer makes the old PageRank number available and any website claiming to have access is either displaying old data or lying. Jul 3 '15 at 5:13

PageRank (PR) is a general measure of how many links point to your page. Note that as the name implies, PageRank is based on pages not sites. So every single page on your site has its own PR - usually the home page is the highest but that's not always the case.

The more pages link to yours, the higher your PR goes. It is a weighted algorithm, so pages with higher PR will have a bigger effect than pages with low PR.

The actual PageRank number you will see is an integer from 0 to 10 inclusive. 0 usually means the page has not been factored into the PR "graph" yet. It's also a logarithmic scale so for example if it took 100 links to go from PR1 to PR2 is may take 1000 or more to go to PR3.

You can check the page rank of any URL using the Google Toolbar, or at prchecker.info

The best advice is not to worry about your PageRank. Just focus on getting links from good sites and creating relevant content and you'll be fine.


PageRank is part of Google's rank algorithm. You have to have links from other sites that do not have nofollow.



There is an article on seomoz.org about PageRank Sculpting that explain a lot of details how pageright is currently used by Google.

It is interesting to know what PageRank is, but in most cases unless you have a huge website that suffers from bad structure -- PR is not something you should care about.

  • 1
    PR sculpting no longer works (at least not in the way described in that SEOmoz post). Google (and presumably other SEs as well) has changed their PR algorithm so that the amount of PR passed by each link on a page is based on the total number of links on the page (including nofollow links). So you can use PR sculpting to decrease PR to certain pages, but it won't increase/concentrate PR to your "dofollow" links. Jan 24 '12 at 6:01

Page Rank measure's the importance of your website. to get page rank you have to do lots of search engine optimizations tactics.

  • You really should read the answers above as this is incorrect
    – John Conde
    Jul 2 '15 at 11:54

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