Any newbie in home business is keen to get a Page Rank (PR) for his/her website or blog. Google gives PR based on the value of the webpage. Does it promise anything? Does it make your webpage rank higher in the search results? Do a search on Google for any keyword or key phrase and chances are that a zero PR website may come on top of the search results.

PR and Search Rank (SR) are two different things. May be, the original intention was to show search results based on PR only. But our genius SEO gurus will leave no stone unturned to manipulate any process. So, Google bosses had to come up with different and constantly changing algorithms to make any SEO manipulations redundant. But SEO experts will not sleep so easily as to give up their efforts. Astonishingly, we talk of transparency and what not in governmental administration but when it comes to private enterprise, everything is a secret!

It appears the originator of this conundrum was Jon Kleinberg who fathered the so-called web-link analysis at IBM. Later, Eugene Garfield of the University of Pennsylvania developed 'citation analysis' in 1950s. In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin started work on the Google search engine which has now more than 78% share globally by mid-July 2008. PageRank takes its name after Larry Page and is not patented by Google but by Stanford University.

According to the definition given by Google, " PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important"."

Without going into the detailed mathematical theories like Markov chain, probability theory etc., PR is directly proportional to a webpage's sum of the products of incoming links' weightage and their respective PRs and inversely proportional to the sum of the products of outgoing links' weightage and their respective PRs. Now weightage reduces according to the number of outward links! That is the whole rigmarole. If a webpage does not have outgoing links (i.e., hyperlinks), the denominator would be zero! So, the PR will be infinite because division by zero gives an infinite value. Such redundancies are cleverly avoided in programming logic because the PR is on a scale of 0 to 10 like the Richter scale and supposedly, logarithmic in nature.

Likewise, even if the denominator is not zero, but if the numerator is zero i.e., the webpage has all worthless incoming links, the PR would be zero. Now I would place some outward links having PR 6 or more on my webpage but there is no guarantee those outward links would maintain that status for long! So, whether I like it or not I have to choose Google, Yahoo or similar strong sites which can be presumed to exist till the deluge. So also, my incoming links should be strong - at least, some. But I cannot expect Google or Yahoo to place a link on their pages to my webpage. So, our genius SEO gurus would suggest stable sites, forums, social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook etc. where I can leave comments or start discussions without spamming to get some good incoming links via my signature.

All this takes a great effort and time. Links should be built over a period of time gradually. But whether all this effort is useful or not depends on whether one gets traffic to one's webpage or not. Then one starts depending upon Pay Per Click advertising and spends a fortune if not wise enough to drop the cards at the right time. After this, one concludes only organic traffic is the key to everything. So, enter SEO gurus. Have a honeymoon for sometime with SEO independently or otherwise.

The best thing is to be found!