How is PageRank calculated?

          To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn)) 

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

 
"share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.
A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn't give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn't a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page's PageRank value. It's like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren't given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as we'll see later.

Ok so far? Good. Now we'll look at how the calculations are actually done.

For a page's calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank "voted" for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page's PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page's PageRank is arrived at. But what isn't immediately obvious is that it can't work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:-

Step 1: Calculate page A's PageRank from the value of its inbound links


Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate.

Step 2: Calculate page B's PageRank from the value of its inbound links
 
Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.
It's a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's PageRank until we know B's PageRank, and we can't work out B's PageRank until we know A's PageRank.
Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can't we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.
The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn't produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it's the reason why the updates take so long.
One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page's actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.


NOTE:
You may come across explanations of PageRank where the same equation is stated but the result of each iteration of the calculation is added to the page's existing PageRank. The new value (result + existing PageRank) is then used when sharing PageRank with other pages. These explanations are wrong for the following reasons:-

1. They quote the same, published equation - but then change it

from

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(......) to PR(A) = PR(A) + (1-d) + d(......)

 
It isn't correct, and it isn't necessary.
2. We will be looking at how to organize links so that certain pages end up with a larger proportion of the PageRank than others. Adding to the page's existing PageRank through the iterations produces different proportions than when the equation is used as published. Since the addition is not a part of the published equation, the results are wrong and the proportioning isn't accurate.
According to the published equation, the page being calculated starts from scratch at each iteration. It relies solely on its inbound links. The 'add to the existing PageRank' idea doesn't do that, so its results are necessarily wrong.

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What is PageRank?

                           PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

From here on in, we'll occasionally refer to PageRank as "PR".

Notes:

Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

How is PageRank calculated?

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Top 14 Free Web Statistics Tools

My guess is each webmaster or blogger use at least one web service to keep track & monitor web traffics. There are tones of free web traffic checkers out there, each a unique of its own. Most of them have something in common though; installation of script is required to generate traffic reports. Installing too many tends to slow the site down and cause inaccuracy in overall results. It’s better to stick with one or two which matches your requirements the most. Here’s by far 14 most used web statistics tools I’ve come to known.

AWStats

AWStats is probably one of the few good ones that don’t require client side script installation. It’s installed on the server side and provides comprehensive logs of traffics accessing particular websites. It’s free and if your web host doesn’t have, request them to install.

StatsCounter

StatCounter is widely used among most tech non-savvy web owners. It gives real time statistics of your web traffic but the drawback of it is, you will need to pay if your traffics exceed 1,500,000 pagviews a month. Well, if you have that much of traffic you wouldn’t mind paying to continue don’t you?

SiteMeter

SiteMeter is another very popular traffic tracking provider. It’s used by a lot of notable websites such as lifehacker, read/write web, gawker, gizmodo, kotaku, etc. And like StatsCounter provides 2 different charges of services; the free and the paid premium. Free services get all basic statistics a webmaster could possibly need but in case you want more comprehensive analysis on your traffics, you will need to get the premium account.

Google Analytics

This is perhaps the most commonly used and most famous web traffic tractor every build. It’s free with functions I’ll take me pages to describe. Google Analytics gives very accurate statistics on not only traffics but also keep track of almost everything a cookie can store (browsers, type of OS, plugins installed, etc) on each unique visitors. It is also used to keep track of Google Adwords performance. And with the new look recently upgraded, it’s certainly better in terms user friendliness and navigation.

FeedBurner

What makes Feedburner different from the rest is that it keeps track of traffic coming from feed readers. Feedburner users can show off how many people are currently subscribing to them by displaying a chiklet on websites. Feedburner’s FAN is also the only traffic counter that offers publishers to make a profit from their traffic. With the recent acquisition of Feedburner by Google, it could have just helped Google to strengthen their domination on traffic counter. Google AdSense on Feedburner is what many AdSense publishers looking forward to see after this acquisition.

103Bees

103bees started off earlier this year but already gain much reputation because they are one among few that concentrates on search engine traffic analyzation. It is one of my favorite tool to measure and check my daily traffic. Check out my reviews on 103bees.

Performancing Metrics

Performancing gives you real time readings of your web traffics however if you want to use it for free for long run, your pageviews/day must not exceed 1000. Upon sign up, Performancing gives you 21days full premium access, after that you will have to pay ($2/month) to continue. If you have high traffic, try using Performancing metrics. If your traffics are among the Top 20, you will earn yourself a PR7 link back from Performancing.com main page.

Reinvigorate

I feel in love with reinvigorate the first time I encounter it. ReInvigorate has nice interface design with traffic charts nicely placed. It makes charts very understandable, very easy for comparison and analysis. However, it’s currently a beta and only available through invitations. Send in a e-mail and let’s hope they will send you an invitation to try it out.

Spotplex

Spotplex shows you not only real time traffic stats, but also how you rank among bloggers of your niche that use Spotplex plugin. Head over to Spotplex website to check the most popular articles of the day, most popular within specific niche or your Spotplex rank today.

Automattic Statistics for WordPress

Automattic Statistics calculates your traffic within WordPress. However Automattic Statistics resides on WordPress.com’s Dashboard. After installing the plugin, there will be an extra button call Blog Stats that will lead you to your statistics in WordPress.com.

OneStats

By putting one small OneStats banner on your website, you not only get to see your web traffic but also get to compete against websites from your country in the OneStats chart. OneStats chart is a very good place to gain publicity and its monitor by many webmasters. It’s ranked based on pageviews so it’s a bit unfair as forums and photo albums have a higher pageview rate.

Counterized II for WordPress

Counterize II upgrades from its previous version to give more traffic data. It embedded inside your WordPress Dashboard, giving you traffic information like IP, timestamp, visited URI, referring URI, total hits, unique hits, etc. All you need to do is install the plugin and view your stats inside Dashboard.
Counterize II upgrades from its previous version to give more traffic data. It embedded inside your WordPress Dashboard, giving you traffic information like IP, timestamp, visited URI, referring URI, total hits, unique hits, etc. All you need to do is install the plugin and view your stats inside Dashboard.

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog stats shows you where your visitors come from, what they read and where they go, but the most interesting thing about MBL is, it includes the statistics of Google AdSense clicked and their sizes.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg tells you where in your page people are likely to click and the most interesting part is, it gives you a heat map display. Install and test it out yourself.

GoStats

GoStats provides not only the normal stats we want to see, it also comes with a prediction figure. The tab navigation from text view to graphic view comes simply in handy. Another good visitors tracking system worth checking out.

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What is Website Traffic?

The number of visitors to a website, and the pages they click on, is called website traffic. When a visitor arrives at the site, their presence is logged and any links that they click on are also monitored. These numbers get added up, giving the website owner an idea of how many people are visiting his or her site. It is a way of measuring the success of a website, as the more traffic it gets, the more popular it is.

Website traffic is monitored through various tools. Many of the best tools are free, but the results may need some interpretation. There are many companies that provide services that monitor and analyze website traffic. There are also ways for website owners to learn to perform this service themselves. It may take a while to learn, but it is a worthy investment, especially if a website owner is serious about growing the traffic to his or her site.
There are many reasons to analyze website traffic. One of the biggest reasons is that it gives site owners a way to monitor the effectiveness of their site. If, for example, a website is registering 3,000 hits during a two-day span, it sounds like the website is doing reasonably well. On closer examination, however, the owner sees that the visitors are only staying a minute, and are not looking at the other content on the site. Now, the owner can try to solve the problem, and find ways to encourage the visitors to stay longer.

Increasing website traffic takes time, luck, and skill. For any one topic, there may be a million or more web pages devoted to it. In order to get traffic to one particular site, the owner needs to know how to get his or her content noticed. One of the best ways to do that is through search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO uses keywords, links, and other methods to improve a websites rank in search engine results. While these methods are not foolproof, and require a lot of research and understanding of how search engines operate, they do give users a step up from other websites not using SEO to build their traffic.

Understanding website traffic can be the key to unlocking the potential of a website. Being able to develop a targeted approach to increase traffic based on how visitors are using a site and on search engine strategies allows the website owner to improve their site in ways they may not have initially thought of. As the website improves, the amount of traffic it sees increases, giving the owner new information that can be used in further improvements.

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What is RSS?

What is RSS? I’m regularly asked this question and thought it might be worth putting together a page to define RSS and hopefully shed some light on the topic.
We have a number of ways that you can subscribe to this site and receive updates. The main one that our readers use is our RSS feed. But what is RSS?

What is RSS?

RSS is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites.
In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.

The problems with bookmarking

• You as the web surfer had to do all the work
• It can get complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once
• You miss information when you forget to check your bookmarks
• You end up seeing the same information over and over again on sites that don’t update very often

RSS Changes Everything

What if you could tell a website to let you know every time that they update? In a sense, this is what RSS does for you.
RSS flips things around a little and is a technology that provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to.
I find the ‘subscription’ description helpful. It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.
How RSS actually technically works is probably a lesson for another day but the key today is for you to understand why it’s good and how to use it.
Let me say right up front that I’m not the most technically savvy guy going around – but even I can use RSS. At first I found it a little strange to make the change from bookmarking to RSS but I found that when I started that I just couldn’t stop.

How to Use RSS

Get an RSS Reader – The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.
There are many feed readers going around with a variety of approaches and features – however a good place to start is with a couple of free and easy to use web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines. Either one will do if you’re starting out (I use Google’s Reader) – as I say there are many others to choose from but to get started either of these are fairly easy to use and will help you work out the basics of RSS.
Both of these feed readers work a little like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item – marking the last one as ‘read’.
The best way to learn how to use either Google Reader or Bloglines is to simply subscribe to some feeds and give it a go. Both have helpful help sections to get you up and running.
Note: other options to tracking websites that you might already be familiar with include using pages like MyYahoo, MyGoogle and MyMSN.
Find Some Feeds to Subscribe to – there are two places to look for a site’s feed:

1. On the Site
2. In Your Browser

On Site Subscription
Over the last few years you may have noticed a lot of little buttons and widgets appearing on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, ‘counters’ with how many ‘readers a blog has, links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:

There are plenty more – but any time you see any of these buttons or anything like them it means that the site you are viewing almost certainly has a feed that you can subscribe to. In most cases it’s as simple as either copying and pasting the link associated with the button into your RSS Reader or clicking the button and following the instructions to subscribe using the feed reader of your choice.
Browser Subscription
Many internet browsers now have the ability to find and subscribe to RSS feeds built right into them.
When you surf to a site you can usually tell if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of address bar where you type in the site’s URL.
Here’s how it looks for EFMB(Earn Money From Blog) when you’re using Firefox:

See the little orange icon on the right hand side? Clic.
Using Safari Browser it is a blue RSS icon:

Other modern browsers will have similar icons.
To quickly and easily subscribe by clicking these icons you’ll want to set up your browser to do it with your feed reader of choice as by default they will probably subscribe you using the in-browser reader. You can do this by going to the ‘preferences’ to your browser and choosing ‘Google Reader’ or ‘Bloglines’ etc as your feed reader.
Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.

Don’t want to Use an RSS Reader? Email is an Option

If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated for you then please don’t worry. Many sites also enable you to subscribe to RSS feeds via a more familiar medium – Email.
Here at EFMB we know that not everyone is into the RSS thing so at the top of our right hand sidebar there is a field where you can enter your email address and get a daily email with a summary of our latest posts. You can unsubscribe at any time and your email will be kept private and not used for any other purposes than to send these daily updates.

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