PageRank or Your Page’s Rank?

May 2nd, 2006 by Chris

I’m sure most of my readers already know this, but I mean honestly I cannot visit a popular webmaster forum and not see this mistake being made. So I’m going to blog about it in hopes of making a central place people can be sent to when they get this wrong.

Your PageRank, or PR, and your page’s rank, are not the same thing. They might look the same, but punctuation matters here.

PageRank, is a proper noun and named after Lawrence Page, the co-founder of Google. I sometimes wish he was named Lawrence Zarinski or something so we could have ZarinskiRank and people wouldn’t be confused.

PageRank, or PR, is a numeric score representing the total weight of all the incoming links (links pointing to one page from another) that a page has. You can read more about PageRank here or here. If someone says that they have a PR of 3, it doesn’t mean they rank 3rd, it means that on a logarithmic scale of 1-10 they have a value of 3 for PageRank.

Your page’s rank, is where it appears in a search engine’s result page, or SERP. If someone say’s their page’s rank is a 3, that means they’re the 3rd listing on a search engine for their keywords.

PageRank is a relatively straight forward mathematical formula. Your page’s rank involves hundreds of factors.

PageRank does influence your page’s rank, it is one of a plethora of factors used by search engines to calculate rankings, however it does not directly equate to rankings.

So in the future, avoid confusion and use the correct term. If you do not, god kills a fairy.

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Posted in: Search Engine Optimization »  by: Chris

2 Responses to “PageRank or Your Page’s Rank?”

  1. Ken Barbalace  Says:
    May 8th, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    Very nice clarification and yes it would have been helpful if Lawrence Page had a different last name. I always knew what PageRank was, but I didn’t realize it was named after Lawrence, I always assumed that it referred to the fact it was determined on a page by page basis (which it is).

  2. TeamGrowth  Says:
    September 28th, 2006 at 8:06 am

    Indeed a very nice clarification. A lot of people tend to get confused between Google PageRank and a Page’s Rank or consider them as the same thing but they are totally different concepts and each have their own importance.

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