I have been blogging for six years already but I never knew the Google Pagerank most bloggers rave about was named after a person. Yes, it was named after CEO, Larry Page; Google's co-founder. Oh please don't laugh at me, but all these years I thought it's called pagerank because it is your web page that is ranked. Makes sense too, right?


Anyway, if you too, don't know what a pagerank is, it's a numerical value (0-10) that is used by Google to determine the importance of a web page.

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. (wikipedia)

When a web page has high ranking, that means it is important and has better authority in leading people who are searching the web to better sources.

Source Site

So many sites were affected when mighty google did a major cleanup; they lost their pageranks and were penalized for advertising. Those who were on top of the list who were using SEO schemes to promote their websites were thrown to the bottom of the list. And sites that are selling links had to suffer as well. They too have been penalized because those links have been thought to be sold illegally. What a lot of people don't understand is that google is not against advertising. If you are a website owner and you offer to link up to other sites or products, you just need to disclose that you have been paid. Not disclosing is okay too, but you have to do nofollow links.