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The truth behind how Google works:
Google is the Web's most popular Search Engine at the moment, it powers the popular google.com website, but also AOL search and many others. Getting listed in Google is vital for any webmaster who wants his/her website to do well, and being listed highly in Google can bring you masses of extra traffic and in-turn, revenue.
BUT, there are many so many myths about how Google works. Most of these are fairly harmless in themselves yet these myths tend to send webmasters down the wrong roads when trying to get a higher rank in Google. The purpose of this free article is to correct the most popular Google myth you will find during your Search Engine research.
Myth Number 1:
The higher your Google PageRank (PR), the higher you will rank in Google's Search Results:
This is probably the most common myth, and in turn is the source of most complaints towards Search Engine Optimiziers and Google itself. Often webmasters will notice that a website with a lower PageRank value than theirs is above them in a search on Google, and then get upset. While pages with a higher PageRank do tend to rank above the lower ones, it is perfectly normal for a site with a lower PageRank value to appear higher in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).
For those of you who don't know what PageRank is, a rather detailed article on this is available at http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/corporate/tech.html.
You can download the Google toolbar, which allows you to view the PageRank for a website at http://toolbar.google.com.
To explain the truth without going into too much technical detail, PageRank is best thought of as being two values. One value, which we'll call "General PageRank" is not much more than the "weight" given to the links on your web pages. This is also the value that is shown in the Google Toolbar (see link above). This value is used to calculate the weight of links leaving your webpage, not your search position.
The other value we will call "Specific PageRank." If PageRank was to be the only factor that is used to calculate search engine results then the site with the highest PageRank would always be listed number 1 for every search you make. That wouldn't be useful to anyone, so Google examines the content of links that point to your web page, and only those links that relate to the search you have made will help you achieve a higher ranking for the keywords you used.
It's quite possible for a site with a lower PageRank to in fact have more "useful" incoming links than a site with a higher "General PageRank". In which case the site with a lower "General PageRank" will be listed above competitors when a search is made for those keywords.
Also, apart from PageRank there are of course also other areas that help you with Google search results (such as the content on your web page), yet PageRank remains the dominant one.
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