PageRank is what made the difference between Google and all the other search engines. Page Rank, also written as PageRank was invented at Stanford University by Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, to determine the websites popularity by considering over 500 million variables and over 2 billion terms. This sounds pretty complicated and many who have heard the Page Rank may not even know what it's there for. To keep it simple, the Page Rank shows how popular a website is, by determining the amount of incoming links to that website and how important, or popular, those links are.
Why do we care? Well in fact, we web businesses are dependent on this Page Rank, because it affects our traffic, and traffic is affects our business. So next time you do a link exchange with another website, you may want to know the page rank of their website and the website they are linking to you from. The algorithms look pretty simple, but are much more complicated when on the web, as you need to find all the websites PR's and the ones linking to those, and the ones linking to those. Here the formula:
PR(A) = PR(B) + PR(C) + PR(D)PR(A) would be your website. Viola! That's as simple as it gets. For more information on the algorithms visit the wikipedia page on Page Ranks.
