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The Pagerank Algorithm
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.. highlights:: **An algorithm is a set of steps required to complete a task. A recipe for making banana bread could also be called "A banana bread algorithm".**

**Pagerank** is the name of the algorithm Google uses to organise which websites come out on top of search. As you can imagine, Pagerank is a very complicated beast, using artificial intelligence and all the newest technologies to try and provide the most relevant, high quality web pages.

The biggest factor in ranking highly on Google is officially called **Backlinking**.

When a site is of high quality, many other websites will have links to it. Pagerank ranks you higher for each site that has a link to yours. Often, this is called **"Link Juice"**.

.. highlights:: **Your website has a certain amount of juice depending on its keywords, and your website gets more juice when it has links to it.**

.. highlights:: **You don't lose this juice when you link to other sites, but the more sites you link to, the less juice each of them get.**

- If you link to 10 websites, each only benefit from 1/10th of your juice.
- If you link to just 2 websites, they each benefit from 1/2 of your juice.

This is why you can't just make 10 websites and have them all link to your main site, aside from the time it would take and the cost to host them, they won't have much link juice of their own to provide.

Huge websites like Facebook and Reddit have massive amounts of link juice, but, they also have a massive amount of external links. This results in Facebook and Reddit links only giving a moderate amount of juice.

The "Juciest" places you should target are pages that are similar to yours, complimentary services and websites that get a lot of traffic but don't have many links. News sources with few adverts are very juicy, as they are high traffic but usually have far less external links than most websites.

Note that adverts can count as link juice, so having ads on other websites does boost your search rankings. **This works only as long as the site with your advert matches the same keywords as your website!** If you have a link from an art gallery website to your computer repair company website, the link juice will not be helpful for your primary keywords.

Other factors that Google considers are how often the site is updated, if the page is mobile friendly, how fast the website loads, domain name, up to date security and how long users spend on your website.