What is Google Page Rank?

So just what exactly is Google's page rank? I've previosuly explained it in terms of what the values can mean, but how is it calculated and what is it used for?

Without getting into the full maths, an overview of page rank goes like this. All search engines want to provide the most relevant results to their users. If the results are good, internet users stick with the search engine. They then do more searches and are more likely to be about to click the adds at the side of the results.

Google, and other search engines, try to find which pages are most relevant to your search terms. They can have a quick stab at how relevant the page is based on content, context etc. But when there are hundreds of thousands of results, they will have lots of pages with 'equal' importance. It is at this point that Google use page rank.

This is the official story according to an article I was reading a couple of days ago. But, although it is backed up by the fact that results aren't listed in page rank order, there are exceptions where page rank outweighs the results of the on page factors.

Try the famous 'click here' search and the first result or two don't have either words on them - that's the power of incoming links. So maybe there should be considered to be 3 factors:

1 - the page content
2 - the incoming links pointing to that page
3 - where the above are equal, the page rank

That could explain all of the above and what we see in results. There are many times when I click on the cached version of a page and see a comment that a certain keyword was only found in links pointing to that page, not on the page itself. This impliess that incoming links have a good amount of weight - probably equal to the content itself.

Why, well we'll look more into Page Rank tomorrow to see. I like to keep the posts short, simple and to the point!