When talking about search engine optimization, it is almost impossible not to stumble upon the phrase: Google page rank. This term is without doubt very important to webmasters who want to obtain a good ranking and a lot of traffic, but why? Well, by simply understanding how the mathematical formula at the heart of the PageRank (PR) is calculated, any webmaster can influence its website's Google listing.

Google page rank is one of the methods this search engine has of evaluating the relevance of a web page. The toolbar PR consists of a number between 0-10 which can be easily seen if you have the Google toolbar installed. If you don't have this toolbar, then visiting quickpagerank.com will allow you to easily check page rank. This website is very easy to use and supplies much more information than the Google toolbar. By simply typing the URL of your site and clicking the "submit" button, you will be able to view your Google page rank, Alexa rank, whether you are listed in Dmoz or not, backlinks showing in major search engines and results coming from AltaVista and the entire web.

PR is short for the Google page rank which is calculated by Google and can range from 0.15 to billions. It represents a "vote" of appreciation or support for a certain website from all the rest existing on the web. It therefore can be zero or a very high number given by the number of links pointing to a site from all the rest. The formula from the original Google paper looks like this: "PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))" and the symbols represent the following: A - the page for which we want to check page rank, T1...Tn - the pages which are pointing to it through links, C(A) - the number of links coming from page A and pointing to other sites and d - damping factor usually set at 0.85. As you can see the calculus is quite difficult and this is because it doesn't stop here.

It seems quite impossible to calculate how exactly Google page rank is assigned to a certain page because the PR of a page depends on the PR of all the pages pointing to it. This leads to circle calculations as the PR of those pages pointing to let's say page "A" also have to be calculated and this is done depending on other sites with their own PR. In addition, Google reevaluates websites periodically re-indexing new links and new pages, all updated and better optimized. Its job is quite difficult, but thank god it's a machine that's doing it and not a human!

So, the conclusion is that Google page rank is too difficult to analyze. Entire pages have been written on its algorithms and a lot of intelligent minds have struggled to find out the undisclosed mathematical intricacies of the PR. All we know are the simple facts that Google listings are influenced by links, among which one way links prove to be more efficient. Therefore everyone strives to optimize their websites as much as possible for keyword searches which are performed by Google spiders all the time. After doing their best, webmasters turn to check page rank.

A really interesting aspect related to Google page rank is that Google's listings don't always show the sites which have the highest PR in their top findings. This is a puzzling fact. To check page rank has become an undisputable habit for webmaster that do their best to promote their online business and obtain more traffic. Sometimes, their main purpose for optimization is to obtain a high Google page rank, but perhaps this is not the perfect approach for Google's ranking system. Of course, PR is very important, but since we don't know for sure how to obtain it, perhaps it would be wiser to do our best to improve website quality and promote them by using only the given facts. So, don't forget that popularity is the key to success! And, after investing in quality, to best analyze your efforts, you should also constantly check page rank and see how things are going from Google's point of view.