Last week I found out that the page rank on my website had dropped from a 5 to a 4. Now, I’ve attended a few internet marketing seminars and so I know that the page rank tool is an indication of how authoritative Google finds my website, but my question is how is page rank calculated? I hope that be learning this I can find out what I’m doing wrong in my SEO campaign.

Ahmed, Kent

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve dropped a PageRank, Ahmed. This can be quite frustrating especially when you’ve got no idea what you’re doing wrong. Luckily the formula for calculating PageRank is no mystery – and here’s a piece of trivia, did you know the term PageRank was actually named after its founder Larry Page and not an unimaginative term to the rank of a page! Anyway, I digress – the formula you’re after is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

where PR(A) is the PageRank of a page A
PR(T1) is the PageRank of a page T1
C(T1) is the number of outgoing links from the page T1
d is a damping factor in the range 0 < d < 1, usually set to 0.85

Have you run away yet?

This might look a little daunting, but basically all it’s saying is that the PR of page A, PR(A), is initially set at 0.15. We then add to that figure for each incoming link, taking into account the number of other links that page has. The basic idea to take from this is that a link that passes lots of PR is one from a high PR page with few links.

So if your PageRank has dropped then it’s probably because the number of links pointing to that page has also been dropped. You should consider a good link-building campaign in order to build your PageRank up.

Having tried to answer your question literally by giving you the formula, what I really wanted to say is that, from our point of view, PR is not a massively important metric in the greater scheme of things.  We at LeadGenerators prefer to look at increases in traffic generated from our priority key phrases – irrespective of the PR of any particular page on the site. That’s what really puts the bacon on the table for most of our clients.

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