The search engines rank the search results of websites based on many factors. Of most importance is the relevance of the page to the words being searched for. Search engines also use the quantity and quality of the links to the page form other sites to also help determine the rankings. Webmasters often call this the ‘link juice‘. There are many ways that webmasters can use to measure the importance of a web page to get some guidance as to how it might rank in search engines. One of the more popular is Google’s PageRank or PR. Theoretically, the more links to a page and the higher quality the higher the PR. Google recalculate and update the PR daily, but only send a snapshot of that for the public to see every 3 or so months, so it does not reflect an accurate PR at any one time. Google also can take away a sites PR and it not known if this is actually a penalty or if the site still has PR and Google have just exported lower value to mislead webmasters who are doing thinks like buying and selling of links based on the PR.
When trying to analyse the PR of page and if it is real, there are several tools available. There is Bing’s Page Score, but this is only available to webmasters for their own sites. SEOMoz have developed their own database and from that provide two scores of MOZRank and MOZTrust that give a different perspective on a page than Google’s PR and Bing’s Page Score. MOZRank is based on the global link popularity of a page, so is like Google’s PR minus all the penalties and filters that Google applies. MOZTrust is a measure of the trust of a domain based on the quality of links to a site. Both these measure are helpful in trying to analyses the ranking of a site in the search results.
