Since the time I have started spending more time on the internet, I have wondered how can one determine which site is more popular, which site gets more visitors, which page has more chances of popping up in a Google Search? Well two of the most trusted means of finding out the importance of a site these days are Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking. So if you are planning to planning to put and advertisement on a website, or buying a site or well just researching a site, there are probably the two ranking you would want to look out for.
Let’s start with Google Page Rank, PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each and every page of the website. The numbers are assigned for 0-10, 0 meaning the page is not ranked by Google, 10 meaning it has the highest rank. The higher the rank, the more important the page is, but the rank of the page doesn’t reflect in anyway the number of visitors it may be receiving. It’s just a measure of how important the page is to Google and lot of other search engines now.
Coming to what is a “Link Analysis Algorithm”, to put it in the simplest way, Google Page rank for a page is calculated by checking how many other sites refer to the page, in other words have link to the page from their pages. Also, taken into account is how important are the pages which are referring to this page, or what’s their own page rank. Thus forming a circle, this is just a gist of the algorithm, the actual algorithm being more complex and Google enjoys a patent on it, actually has sole rights to the patent.
According to Google,
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”.
Now to Alexa Ranking, to put it in the simplest was Alexa Ranking is a measure of how many visitors are coming to a site. Ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4,000,000 sometimes. Alexa is opposite to Google PageRank, the LOWER your rating on Alexa the more visitors your site is getting. 4,000,000 is for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic basically, whereas 1 is the site with the most traffic. So if you have a rating of say 300,000, you are getting about 14x the amount of traffic a 4,000,000 site gets.
Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other diverse sources over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Unlike Google’s page rank, Alexa’s traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). Rankings are not given for subdomians.
Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking are quiet different, one is a measure of importance of the page to Google, the other is a measure of traffic to the site. You can have a site with a page rank of 7 but very few visitors hypothetically. But in a way both are interrelated, higher pagerank means more chances of popping up in a search result and the a page comes up in search results the more traffic it can get. So get going check the Google Page rank and Alexa ranking for your site, there are several sites on the offering the service, Google them.
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