How Important are You?

Google PageRank® is a measure of how important Google thinks your website is.

The Google website defines PageRank as follows -

"The heart of our software is PageRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." "

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank [Vise and Malseed, 2005]) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998.

PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. Some examples are

• PageRank 10
  • New York Times
  • W3C
  • Apple
  • Adobe
• PageRank 9
  • BBC Online
  • The White House
  • Microsoft
  • eBay
• PageRank 8
  • Google
  • al-jazeera
  • NZ Govt
  • NZ Herald
  • Greenpeace
  • NYSE
• PageRank 7
  • Stuff
  • BP Global
• PageRank 6
  • The Labour Party
  • The National Party
  • The Pentagon
  • Trademe
• PageRank 5
  • Spiral
  • Hutt City Council
  • Vega Industries
  • CACR
  • CRL Energy
  • Parents Centre
• PageRank 4
  • Quinovic Property Management
  • Paardekooper
  • Hutt Valley High
  • Kenex
  • Southlight
  • Te Kaihau
• PageRank 3
  • Onslow College
  • The Art Library
  • Canvasland
  • CEAS
  • Espresso Solutions
  • Flowers Rediscovered
  • Helium Worksearch
  • MKTA

Many, many websites are lower than 3.

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank - of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. You can check your PageRank by downloading the Google toolbar and installing on your computer - or ask us at Spiral what your PageRank is and we'll look it up for you.

Audrey Shearer
©Spiral Web Design Limited
18 September 2006

 

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