Formula Google Uses to Calculate the Pagerank

Google has developed a technology to determine the quality of a website called the Pagerank or PR. The Pagerank is a number between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best. As a website owner you strive for the highest possible Pagerank. In this article i will show you the formula that Google uses to calculate the Pagerank of a website or individual page.



Pagerank calculation

Google keeps the formula for determining the Pagerank a secret. Otherwise people could abuse it. The formula has changed over the years. Still, some things that determine the PR are public. Google looks at the incoming and outgoing links from your website.

Sites with a high Pagerank linking to your site are worth more than sites with a lower PR. And hundreds of links from sites with Pagerank 2 are perhaps less valuable than one inbound link from a site with Pagerank 5. The scale of Pagerank is logarithmic, meaning that for example 10 links can get you a PR 1, but for a PR 2 you need 10x10 = 100 links to your site.

Formula to calculate Pagerank

There is a small part of the famous formula that Google uses to calculate the Pagerank public. This formula is not complete and it is not known how far this formula is up to date.

Example of the formula:

PR (A) = (1 - d) + d * SUM ((PR (I-> A) / C (I))

Explanation of terms:

• PR (A) is the Pagerank of your web page A.
• d is the damping factor and is typically 0.85. For example, if a page with a PR of 10 with only one link to another web page, than this page gets  a value of 8.5. In this way, a linked page ranks lower than its referrer. The PR is then if it were muted.
• PR (I-> A) is the Pagerank of page I pointing to your site.
• C (I) is the number of links from I that refer to other sites.
• PR (I-> A) / C (I) is the value that your page A gets from page I passed through in the Pagerank calculation.
• SUM (PR (I-> A) / C (I)) Finally, the sum of all values of data pages that link to your page A.

The Pagerank formula explained in words

The Pagerank of your pages is determined by the PR of each page that points to your page A. The PR of referring page's is divided by the number of outgoing links, and those results are added together and multiplied by 0.85.

Finally, 0.15 is added to the Pagerank to determine your page A. Google repeats this formula a few times to create a individual PR for all indexed pages.

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Information about the Google Pagerank

Google has developed a technology to determine and improve the quality of a web page. Google gives every page a score called the Pagerank. The Pagerank is a number between 0 and 10, with 10 being the highest possible rank your website can get. If your site has a high page rank it will probably have a good chance of scoring high in search engines.



Basically the page rank is separated from your position in the Google search engine results. You can have a high Pagerank but standing low in the list of search results, or vice versa. But because both things are judged on the same number of points, the sites with a high page rank are usually standing at the top of the search results.

Some things to look at your Google Pagerank

• Make sure you update your website regularly. This has a positive effect on both the page rank and your score in search engines.

• Ensure good inbound links and outbound links. Relevant websites with a high Pagerank provide good backlinks, it can make your own page rank go up too. The value of reciprocal links (link exchange) is significantly reduced.

• Google is not happy with buying links. So keep that in mind and be careful.

•  Internal links on your website have a positive affect on your Pagerank.

Today the links from directories have almost no influence any more on your position in the search results.

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Effect of custom domain conversion on traffic and PageRank

As you know, Blogger has introduced custom domain whereby you can register your own domain name and use it for your blog instead of the sub-domain of blogspot.com. Some may be deterred from using custom domain because it involves a change of URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and PageRank of the blog reduced to being not ranked, both which may reduce the traffic to the blog.

Last year I finally decided to make the leap and convert one of my less traffic blog, http://dummies-guide-to-google-blogger.blogspot.com/ to custom domain, namely http://www.blogger-book.com/.

Regarding PageRank, it did get downgraded from a PageRank of 4 to being not ranked at all. However, the PageRank of Blogger book has now increased to PageRank 1 and is expected to increase as time goes by. The best of all is, it appear that PageRank is not that crucial to getting hits (traffic) as the conversion to custom domain, despite the PageRank downgrad, did not decrease. In fact, from an average of 3020 unique visitors per month from the month of January to October (before conversion), the number of unique visitors have increased to 3976, an increase of 32% (see screen shot below):

However, before I convert, I saved all the permalink prior to conversion to custom domain to test whether the old permalink will be redirected to the new custom domain permalink. I am happy to report that all the old permalink is being effortlessly redirected to the new custom domain permalink (individual post URL).



Update 1:Unlike Wordpress.org where you have your own domian and have to pay for hosting, conversion to custom domain will cost you nothing for hosting. Blogger will how for you free. You only pay for registration and renewal of the domain.

Update 2: A blogger has complained that after conversion, traffic went down to almost zero. It turned out that the blogger registered the domain direct from Godaddy. In my case, I registered using Google Apps via SETTINGS > PUBLISHING, paid for the registration and did the conversion to custom domain all within Blogger, never directly through Godaddy. Looks like most of those bloggers experiencing problems with custom domain did it via Godaddy.

Disclaimer: Do not take this as an encouragement to covert to custom domain as this is my personal experience and may or may not be replicable

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PageRank downgraded or unranked: What to do.

Let's address the second question first. All now website start with no PageRank. It is also probably not indexed. See Check if your website is indexed and how to get it indexed. For those who are in a hurry, see Fastest way to get indexed by search engine.

Your website may also be black listed by search for practicing Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) such as making text invisible by making the font color same as background.

A blogger complained his blog's PageRank has been downgraded to unranked. There can be various reasons why a website's PageRank may be downgraded. One of them is what they call the "Google Dance". Google changes its algorithm and some websites may get their PageRank increased, some downgraded, some downgraded very badly. I am not aware of anything we can do about this, unless you know the inner workings of Google search engines which they will NEVER reveal.

Or perhaps, you can. Check Google Webmaster Guidelines and see if you are complying with their guidelines.

After ensuring your website complies with their guidelines, if you don't already have a Google sitemap for your website, add Google sitemap (click BACK button to get back to this page) to your website, then go to Google Webmaster Tools, click "request reconsideration", select "request reconsideration", select the website if you have more than one, submit request, then pray hard.

Recently, I read that Google has downgraded blogs which participate in "Pay per post" to ZERO (0). I heard too that those who have Text Link Ads on their websites got their PageRank downgraded.

NOTE: Some sites recommend adding rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> hyperlink tag that someone paid you to add to your blog, and then asking for reconsideration. This will probably work. Each person have their own views about what is right and wrong, but my view is that if someone paid you to put that link and you add that rel="nofollow" attribute to get your PageRank up again, I think one should inform the person who paid for the link and see if they agree or have some feedback. But of course don't take this as me telling you what you should do.

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