Google - Page Rank Explained

When search engines first began appearing on the scene way back in 1995 or so, they simply examined web pages and determined from various webmaster-supplied items (metatags) and the text on the page how to index them. 

This worked for a while and it worked well. The big search engines such as Altavista and Excite all worked this way and provided useful results to searchers. In fact, they (as well as a few others) were so successful that they attracted huge numbers of advertisers and became the preferred search engines of the late 1990s.

However, the spammers figured out how to beat the system, and by the end of the decade the search engines were rendered more or less useless. Surfers began finding other alternatives because they didn't want to find pornographic sites every time they looked for something.

Google solved this problem (at least for the time being) by considering links to pages as more important than the pages themselves. But in addition to the links, the quality of the links are also important. A link from a "more important" site is much better than a hundred links from sites of lesser importance.

Page rank shows in the following locations.

Toolbar

Directory