by Danny Buys
Could it be that the almost godlike search engine ,Google's Algorithm could be this simple yet devilishly tricky that implementing it becomes somewhat of a BlackArt as someone I know referred to it.
To most this shouldn't come as such a surprise because it appears that Google's Algorithm is not such a State secret after All. Secret or not it is a fundamental part of the way in which Google or "G" as most people call them in the forums supremely and ultimately decides your Ranking. Coming to understand this formula can greatly help your search engine optimization and eventually your rankings.
Pagerank is the Algorithm being used by the Google engine, originally founded and formulated by Sergey Brin and his mate Larry Page in their paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". This concept is based on the premise that prevalent in academia, that the significance or importance of aresearch paper can be judged by the number of citations the paper receives from other highly acclaimed research papers. Brin and Page basically transferred this concept or premise to its web equivalent.In Laymens terms this means: the importance of a web page can be judged by the number of hyperlinks pointing to it from other web pages.
Now that we know that what is Google's algorithm?:
Besides looking quite intimidating it is quite Savvy in its simplicity, the formula goes as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Where PR(A) is the PageRank of a page APR(T1) is the PageRank of a page T1C(T1) is the number of outgoing links from the page T1d is a damping factor in the range 0 < d < 1, usually set to 0.85
Ultimately the Pagerank of a website is calculated as a sum of the Pageranks of all the pages Linking to it(inbound or incoming links). This is then divided by the number of Links on everyone of those pages(outbound links).
From an Seo perspective this means that there are two ways in which pagerank can affect the position of your page on google:
+The number if incoming links. The more the merrier. One thing to keep in mind:The Algorithm tells us that No incoming links should have a negative effect on the pagerank of the page it it points at. Worst case scenario is that it will have no effect at all.
+The number of outgoing links on the page that points to your page. The fewer or less of these the Better. Put in context this means that 2 pages of equal pagerank linking to you, one with 5 outbound links and one with 10, that the one with 5 outbound links will give you twice the increase in pagerank.
So at the end of the day when you are considering your search engine optimization approach, remember that Google doesn't just Rank by keyword, it also ranks by links.
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