PageRank refers to the relevance of a page on a website This is assigned to every page of every website on the internet (at least the pages that they are aware of and have permission to crawl).

Now, there are 2 kinds of PageRank…”real PageRank” and “ToolBar PageRank”. Real PageRank is a more complex topic, and actually we know far less about it. So I’m just focusing on ToolBar PageRank today.

ToolBar PageRank assigns each webpage a ranking from 0 to 10. Therefore, every single page on the internet is ranked from PR0 all the way to PR10. Only one website is rated PR10, and that is Google…obvi right?

Other sites such as Facebook and YouTube are ranked PR9 (even though Facebook passed Google as the most visited internet site last week…if you were’t aware of that fact…that is HUGE news in my pathetically geeky world..additionally confirmed my geeky-ness by using a Star Wars image along with this post).

There are pages on the internet that Google identifies as having no Search Engines or are not fully optimized are classified or ranked PR0. Such sites either have just a page with the contents duplicated or they lack back links.

How PageRank Works

The distribution on page ranking is done from top to bottom. It begins at the page a link is pointing to..which is usually the home page, then flows to other pages that that page links to.

Using a Retail Store as an example…where the majority of links are pointing to the homepage, the main or root page is where the highest ranking starts. It is then evenly passed to the section pages and lastly the product pages of the retail store.

Plugging Up Holes in PageRank

There are certain pages on your site that Google doesn’t need to see. These pages include your Terms of Use and Policy pages (also known as your legal pages).

You wouldn’t want Page Rank to flow into these pages. You may equally wish to block or hide your about pages. It is also important that you ensure that any page on your website without commercial content or value is duly blocked.

You can easily do this with the “nofollow” tag. The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content to be indexed by search engines. Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Bing search engines also respect this attribute.

Example:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount drugs</a>

…that’s it. Just add rel=”nofollow” to your HTML links.

There are other, more complex methods to sculpt PageRank, but this is one of the easiest ones. You (or your webmaster) can implement this within a few minutes.

Author Info:  Brian Horn, of HornDog Search Marketing, is recognized by many as the "Glazer-Kennedy Secret Weapon", because of his role in helping not only Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer with search engine optimization and social media, but also many of the top Information Marketers in the world. Brian shares SEO tips for small businesses over at at his blog, BeOnPage1Blog.com.