PageRank Lookup And How To Find My Website Ranking On Google

How to find my website ranking on Google with a PageRank lookup.

First of all, there are various tools where you can check where your website is ranking on Google and other search engines. But let us first understand how page rank works.

Many articles on the Internet that try to explain how PageRank (PR) works make use of math. Not so strange since PageRank is based on a mathematical formula.

However, not everybody is a mathematician so in this article PageRank will be explained using as little math as possible and when it needs to be used, I will keep it as simple as possible.

Google Tool Bar PageRank

The PageRank that you see in the Google toolbar is not the real PageRank of the page. It is a logarithmic representation of the real PageRank which means for an increase of 1 in the toolbar the real PageRank needs to increase 10 times*. Most probably Google did this to get rid of very big numbers which would feel meaningless. Also, from an intuitive point of view, a PageRank of 6 really is worth 1000 times the value of a PageRank of 3.

Real PageRank

The complicated formula of Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (founders of Google) can be found in their original document which they wrote when they were students at Stanford University. This formula means the following in plain English:

The amount of PR that is transferred depends on a dampening factor which stands for “the probability that a random surfer will get bored”. The dampening factor generally is set to 0.85. Further in this article there will be more information about the dampening factor.

The more outgoing links a web page has, the less PR of that page will be transferred to each of the pages it links to. To do this devide the real PageRank by the number of outgoing links and multiply it with the dampening factor to calculate the amount of PageRank that is transferred.

By perfoming this for all pages that link to your page and you know your own PageRank.

One problem here is that you don’t know any real PageRanks. All you have is what the Google Toolbar gives you, which is not very accurate.

But it would be important only if you wanted to calculate the PageRank very accurately. More important is your internal linking structure:

Internal linking structure

You can not control the links that point at your pages from outside your web site. Therefore you should be happy with each link that points at your web site, and not worry about them.

You do control the links inside your web site and it is possible to give more PageRank to some of your pages if you want to. You have 2 basic choices:

1. Make 1 page receive most PR or
2. Distribute PR evenly over all your pages.

These 2 forms are easy to arrange:

• Link from 1 page to all other pages and link back from all other pages. Do not make any other internal links.
• Link from all pages to all pages.

Of course in the real world, these link structures don’t make much sense. But with this knowledge, you can structure things in such a way that you still get a result that is satisfying. Follow these rules and you will get close to what you want:

• Link from all pages to the 1 or a few pages you want to give extra PR.
• Keep linking between the other pages to a minimum. But do make sure that visitors don’t have to click more than necessary.
• Link from all pages to all pages as much as possible. Do make sure that the menu is clear and people don’t have to search for the link they need.

That is all there is to it.

Dampening factor (d)

The PageRank formula uses a dampening factor which is used to determine how quickly a random surfer would get bored with the page. Google and other sources do not talk much about this dampening factor except that it generally is set to 0.85. Lets first see what happens if this dampening factor is changed:

• Increase d --> amount of pr that is transferred goes up.
• Decrease d --> amount of pr that is transferred goes down.

Following what Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page said about the dampening factor, I would say (and this is just speculation) that Google figures out some other factors to determine how boring (or not) a page is:

• More boring --> Increase d
• Less boring --> Decrease d

You may think that that does not make sense. But follow this logic: The more boring a page is, the quicker a random surfer will decide to click through to another page. This means that the PR should increase when a page is boring and decrease when a page is so interesting the surfer won’t click further.

So this was the explanation of PageRank lookup. And now check these websites for How To Find My Website Ranking On Google

Google Webmaster Tool - Free

Ahref -  7 Days Free Trial

SERPwatcher -  10 Days Free Trail

Google Rank Checker - 14 Days Free Trial

AccuRanker - 14 Days Free Trial

I hope this article helped you understand PageRank a little better. If you have any questions, just comment below.