What is a Page Rank

Page Rank as the name says it is the ranking of a particular page based on different aspect that we have discussed below, but before that lets have a proper introduction of Page Rank.

What is Page Rank?
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

Google describes PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, 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.”

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank).

Internet is a web of a lot of webpages, and webpages contains a lot of links called hyper links to different webpages, this process goes on and on. Everyday lot of new webpages is added in this list in some of which contains useful information needed by you. But you don't know the url/address of all sites, therefore you uses Internet search engine like Google which helps you to find out those important pages. Now the question is how Google predicts which page is important and which one is not. This is where the concept of Page rank comes into being. This article will describe Google's PageRank algorithm and how it returns pages from the web's collection of 25 billion documents that match search criteria so well that "google" has become a widely used verb.

Most search engines, including Google, continually run an army of computer programs that retrieve pages from the web, index the words in each document, and store this information in an efficient format. Each time a user asks for a web search using a search phrase, such as "search engine," the search engine determines all the pages on the web that contains the words in the search phrase. (Perhaps additional information such as the distance between the words "search" and "engine" will be noted as well.) Here is the problem: Google now claims to index 25 billion pages. Roughly 95% of the text in web pages is composed from a mere 10,000 words. This means that, for most searches, there will be a huge number of pages containing the words in the search phrase. What is needed is a means of ranking the importance of the pages that fit the search criteria so that the pages can be sorted with the most important pages at the top of the list.

One way to determine the importance of pages is to use a human-generated ranking. For instance, you may have seen pages that consist mainly of a large number of links to other resources in a particular area of interest. Assuming the person maintaining this page is reliable, the pages referenced are likely to be useful. Of course, the list may quickly fall out of date, and the person maintaining the list may miss some important pages, either unintentionally or as a result of an unstated bias.
Google's PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its ability to provide unbiased results to search queries; Google claims, "the heart of our software is PageRank." As we'll see, the trick is to ask the web itself to rank the importance of pages.

You can check your Page rank from here

How to increase your PR
http://increase-pr.blogspot.com/

To know how page rank algorithm works click here ..