Web Dragons X-Ray: From Smashing Magazine — PageRank Explained

Fol­low­ing on the Web Dragon’s book review post.

Smash­ing Mag­a­zine has an arti­cle on how Google’s PageR­ank (cur­rently) works. It’s a sum­mary of the things that are known about Google’s PageR­ank algorithm.

It’s good to see a dis­cus­sion of PageR­ank that reminds the reader the PR is a mea­sure of quality/authority of a page and is not a test for rel­e­vance. PR is estab­lished inde­pen­dent of your search; it’s used after the search results are gath­ered to help in the rank­ing of the results.

The arti­cle is made up mostly of quotes that illus­trate aspects of how PageR­ank is cal­cu­lated and used. Every quote includes a link to it’s source so you are free to explore fur­ther if some­thing catches your eye. There’s a small sec­tion with ref­er­ences to a selec­tion of papers and arti­cle for those curi­ous about the heavy lift­ing and com­plex math­e­mat­ics involved in the algorithm.

If you have your own web­sites and are curi­ous about their PageR­anks you can use one of sev­eral tools listed in the Tools and Ser­vices sec­tion. Be aware that these are links directly to the tools and the descrip­tions won’t help you choose a best tool for the job.

Well worth the 20– to 30 min­utes that it will take you to read it. Def­i­nitely some­thing to book­mark for the col­lec­tion of links. If you don’t like to screen read longer arti­cles they have promised a PDF in the near future. I’ll add it’s link to this post when I get it.