Anything we want to know, buy or sell now has an online presence and a major reason for the importance of online presence has been due to Google. Search engines in general are essential for our lives even outside of our laptops and phones. Everything from the best pita bread recipes, trends in the stock market to directions to the local park are filtered out by search engines to give us the relevant information we need by the click of a button.
How does Google decide what links and information show up on top? Well, obviously the keywords in your query are run through its database to look for relevant data, but chances are there are thousands of websites and webpages with your keyword in it. Google looks at the quality of the content in these websites, how many times the keyword is mentioned in the website, whether there are and technical or coding errors, etc. and decides the order the websites show up on its results page. However, before all these factors came into play, there was one very important one known as page rank, named after Google’s founder Larry Page.
Larry Page took page rank to be a notation of the worthiness of a website. It is the number of backlinks that website has garnered through activities. Google counts the number and quality of links to a page to determine the rough estimate of how important that website is. The basic assumption is that the more important and authoritative websites will receive more links from other websites. The links or backlinks we are talking about are like referrals or endorsements that are given by different websites to recommend your website to their users. Page rank is rated by giving a number out of 10 with a 10/10 website being a very famous website. Earlier, page rank numbers were public but now they are hidden, though it is believed to be used internally by Google.
Not long after Google came out with this concept, people started misusing it by paying other people to add links for their website and link chains started happening. Due to this, Google decided that not only the number of links but who links to you is important. 1 link from from a famous website like Times of India was can be worth 8 times more that a link from a normal website. Furthermore, Google also started looking at how many backlinks you are giving out, as your page rank would decide the value of the links you give out. This is how Google made sure that websites would not indiscriminately give out backlinks.
In recent times, the concept of Page Rank has been replaced with Page Authority or Domain Authority. It has a similar concept but domain authority is out of 100 and tells the average number of rank for all pages on a website. Page authority is the authority of the home page. You can find out the page and domain authority for any website by searching on: www.moz.com.