Originally posted by redhippo
in simple English please!!:tri:
I can always give it a try.
PR (pagerank) is a google term for the calculated importance of a PAGE (not domain, not site). Without going into what info is available on the algorithm that calculate this, I'll try to explain what it is;
If one page,
http://www.examplename.com/file.html, is linked from a page with 10 links in total (also counts internal links) and a pagerank value of 5. Then the given pagerank is 5/10=0,5 (pagerank divided by total numer of links). If the same file is linked from 5 other pages, with PR5 and 10 links in total, the total pagerank given to the page would be 2,5
In that way google goes through all the links pointing to the file, to calculate the total pagerank. Then it multiply this value by a damping factor (probably about 0,85). This gives 2,5*0,85=2,125 to the example page.
Then all the pages are given a starting pagerank which is 1 minus the damping factor. This means we will add 1-0,85 to the above value.
The name mentioned in this thread (it's main page) got about 40 links from PR4 pages which holds about 10-15 links each. Referring to the above discussion, you could realize the importance of these links to the pagerank of the name.
When it comes to very popular terms in google, it's a total must to have a good PR for your page matching the search, to be listed in the top of the SERPs (search engine result page). When one page found to match the search term closely to equally as good as another, the one with the best PR takes the first position.
PS. I know there are some minor faults in the PR calculation, but I left some things out by purpose to keep it in a decently understandable manner.
