Google’s PageRank

Specifically, Google considers the quantity, quality and anchor text of back links when determining PageRank, whereas Yahoo and MSN rely heavily upon the quantity of a site’s back links when ranking pages. This is the primary difference between the main search engines. In essence, the search engine companies have determined the web community should vote upon popular and important websites by linking to them. Therefore, the quantity and quality of votes are important factors search engines consider when ranking websites.

The descriptive text (anchor text) used to link to other sites is another ingredient of the PageRank algorithm. Search engines associate a website with the anchor text of incoming links. The founders of Google defined PageRank as the chance that a random surfer will find a particular website. The chances of finding the website are influenced by what other sites say about a particular site’s content. Therefore, the text a site uses to describe another site (anchor text) influences the outcome of a particular search. Recently, Google has placed increased emphasis on the importance of links from relevant websites that use varied anchor text.

Google is constantly updating their methodology, their primary concern being the number of naturally occurring links. This is a crucial concept to consider when determining which text links to purchase.