Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, invented PageRank and it forms the basis for how Google works. Google didn't become the best search engine in the world by chance; it became the best search engine because it provided the best results.

PageRank determines the value of a website for a given search term or keyword phrase. This value is determined by how websites link together with the more popular sites receiving more links. It's these incoming links that help the site have a high PageRank value and display higher up in search results.

PageRank system explained by Google:
'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.'

Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content to determine if it's a good match for your query.'

To understand Google PageRank we must understand the variables that determine how well your site performs in Google. These are the most important variables:
- Incoming links to your site.
- The relevancy of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.
- The keywords that other sites use to link to your site.
- The keywords on your website in particular in places like page titles and headlines.
Some of those factors you can control, others you can manipulate but not directly control. The important thing to understand about PageRank is that all those variables will determine how high your site shows up in search engine results.

If you install the Google Toolbar into your browser you can choose to switch on the PageRank display. The ranking starts at 0 (no ranking) up to 10, the highest ranking and can be blanked out completely if the page has been banned from Google.

Also you can try this free PageRank lookup tool to find the ranking for any web address.

written by Cristian L.