Backlinks and Rankings

How is pagerank and ranking determined? Is it by how many backlinks I build to my site? What are the biggest factors to ranking high?

These were some very good questions I was asked, so here are the answers for everyone.

How is PageRank determined?
There is a very complicated pagerank formula, but that’s not improtant unless you want to calculate your own pagerank. The basic way to explain how pagerank is determined is to look at the diagram below (from Wikimedia Commons).

When a webpage links to another webpage, part of the pagerank from webpage one goes on to webpage two. How much of the pagerank? The more outlinks a page has, the less it can give to each link. This takes us to the next question:

Is it by how many backlinks I build to my site?
No. The amount of backlinks doesn’t matter, what really matters is their quality. 100 links from quality PR1 pages are better than 200 links from PR0 pages (assuming all outlinks are identical on both pages). Of course, having more links will get you more pagerank, but pagerank isn’t determined by the number of incoming links you have,

What are the biggest factors to ranking high?
Content and links are probably the biggers factors in ranking high. Content is always first, because you can’t rank high without worthy content. Another factor I’d like to discuss is pagerank on your individul pages. Too many webmasters are concerned with linking to their homepage. A lot of content is off the homepage, so deep linking your site is smarter than linking everyone to the homepage. Remember that pagernak is assigned per page, not per domain. After all, 200 PR2 pages are better than one PR5 page.