PageRank

A trademark of Google and patent of Stanford University that was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and began being developed in 1995.  PageRank helps sort web pages on the Internet by running the page through an algorithm and giving it a numerical weight that is used to sort results when a user uses the Google search engine.

A PageRank is determined by several different factors and although it's not officially disclosed below is a listing of some of the well known factors that can increase or decrease the overall PageRank.

1. By far the most important factor is how many pages link to the page. Pages with higher PageRank values that link to the page will give that page a higher value.
2. Quantity of keywords matched with the search query, their position on the page, and in some cases how they're formatted (e.g. bolded). In addition to the keywords matched in the page keywords matched in the domain and page URL are also looked at.
3. How often new content and pages are created.
4. The last time the page was updated.
5. Outbound links to other pages. Linking to poorly ranked pages, link farms, or having several broken outbound links can decrease the overall PageRank.
6. The age of the page and domain hosting the page.

• Additional information about increasing your PageRank, your search engine ranking, and other information about increasing the performance of your website ranking can be found on our promoting page.

Also see: Google, Google bomb, Search engine, SEO