Google PageRank Determination Overview

Another factor that determines the position of your pages in Google is your Google "PageRank." PageRank is Google's determination of how popular your website is compared to other sites on the web. It ranks the site on a scale of 0-10. Generally speaking the way Google determines this is by counting the number of other sites that link to your site. The more sites that link to you, the higher your PageRank will be. Depending on how high the PageRank of the site that links to you is, the more it will influence your own page's PageRank. There are other factors that influence PageRank. Google is quite secretive about how all this works, but it's always a good idea to solicit a link from other sites back to your site to improve your own PageRank.

If you want to check your site's current PageRank you can download and install the Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com) and turn the PageRank option on. Just click on the Google logo on the toolbar and choose "options" and check "display PageRank." This will add a small green bar to the Google toolbar. If you mouse over this bar on any given site it will display that page's PageRank. I only turn this on when I want to check a page's PageRank and I then turn it off because Google tracks the sites you look at when PageRank is turned on as one factor in determining overall PageRanks. You can also check PageRank with some online tools such as www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker and www.rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php.

* You can check to see if your page has been indexed by Google in a couple ways. First, try typing in the title of the page to see if it shows up. Depending on how specific your phrase is, how much competition there is for that phrase, and how high your PageRank is, your site should show up in the results. If it does not, try copying a specific phrase from the content of the page you're checking. Make sure it is a very specific phrase, likely to be unique to the page. Then paste that phrase into a Google search, surrounding it with quotation marks. If your page is indexed it should come to the top of the list. If it does not, it means that either Googlebot has not spidered that page yet, or else they haven't re-indexed their database since they last spidered the page. Try looking for the page again in a few days.