However, there are several parables about how Google works and, while reasonably safe in themselves, these fables have a tendency to permit folk to draw wrong conclusions about how Google works. This parable is frequent, and is the source of many grouses. Folks often notice a site with a lower PageRank than theirs is noted above them, and get upset. While pages with a higher PageRank do have a tendency to rank better, it is completely standard for a site to appear higher in the results lists though it’s got a lower PageRank than competing pages. To clarify this concept without going into too much technical detail, it’s best to think about PageRank as being made up of 2 different values. This is also the price shown in the Google Toolbar. This price is used to figure out the weighting of the links leaving your page, not your search position.

The toolbar does not show your tangible PageRank, only an estimation of it. It gives you an integer rank on a scale from 1-10. We don’t know precisely what the diverse integers correspond to, but we are certain that their curve has similarities to an exponential curve with each new “plateau” being harder to reach than the last. I have personally done some research into this, and so far the results point to an exponential base of four. So a PR of six is four times as tricky to reach as a PR of five.

This parable is a typical source of wrong expectations about Google. Folk will most likely see a site with less backlinks than their own site has a higher PageRank, and say that PageRank isn’t based totally on inbound links.

The reality is that PageRank relies on inbound links, but not just on the quantity of them. Instead PageRank relies on the price of your backlinks. To find the value of an incoming link observe the PR of the source page, and divide it by the number of links on that page. It’s completely feasible to get a PR of six or seven from only a few inward links if your links are “weighty” enough. The cause of this is that Google does not list all of the links that it knows about, only those that contribute above a specific amount of PageRank. This is particularly obvious in a brand spanking new site.

By default, all pages in Google have a minimum PR. So even a page without any inbound links has a PR worth, even though a little one. If you’ve got a new site with twenty or thirty pages, all of which Google has spidered, but you don’t have any backlinks from other sites, then your pages will still have a PageRank coming from these internal links. As your default page is likely linked to from each page on your internet site, it would even get a PageRank of nearly one or two from all of these tiny boosts. However, in this situation hunting for inward links will probably yield zero results.