my PageRank™ is 5
May 2, 2008 by Balaji
It has been a long time since I made my last post…. I have been a little busy with my work and haven’t been able to concentrate on blogging. I am a guy who believes in numbers and I am concerned about the number of Visitors to my blog, Comments, Spam comments and finally Page Rank. I was eager to know the Page Rank of my blog…. and checked it yesterday and was shocked to see my blog come off age. The Page Rank now is 5 for the home page and few posts also has a Page Rank of 4. Pretty Good, isn’t it?
I am a huge fan of Google and their technology and I have been following PageRank for a while. It took a long time for me to understand how it really works. Google describes PageRank:
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”.
You must be wondering how did this page manage to get a PageRank of 5, let me give you the reason why. Wikipedia give a better explanation about PageRank. Here is an excerpt of it:
Assume a small universe of four web pages: A, B, C and D. The initial approximation of PageRank would be evenly divided between these four documents. Hence, each document would begin with an estimated PageRank of 0.25.
In the original form of PageRank initial values were simply 1. This meant that the sum of all pages was the total number of pages on the web. Later versions of PageRank (see the below formulas) would assume a probability distribution between 0 and 1. Here we’re going to simply use a probability distribution hence the initial value of 0.25.
If pages B, C, and D each only link to A, they would each confer 0.25 PageRank to A. All PageRank PR( ) in this simplistic system would thus gather to A because all links would be pointing to A.
PR(A)= PR(B) + PR(C) + PR(D)
But then suppose page B also has a link to page C, and page D has links to all three pages. The value of the link-votes is divided among all the outbound links on a page. Thus, page B gives a vote worth 0.125 to page A and a vote worth 0.125 to page C. Only one third of D’s PageRank is counted for A’s PageRank (approximately 0.083).
This means that if my page is linked by pages containing heavier PageRank, then my page would also get a good PageRank. You might be wondering which of those heavily Ranked pages link to this page? I have an answer for that too. I have 246 tags until my last post, which means that I am linked by 249 pages from WordPress apart from the Blogroll and the Trackbacks.
If you did not get what I just mentioned, try accessing http://wordpress.com/tags/ by replacing with any word you can think of. The keyword is the tag itself. Out of the 246 pages (to which any post is linked to), atleast half of them have their PageRank between 5-10. Can this be called Spoofed PageRank? May be not….
PageRank™ is a registered TradeMark of Google Inc. To know more about PageRank, you may access the below links.
