What is PageRank, LocalRank and Hilltop?
If you are a serious SEO expert or want to be, then you need to familiarize yourself with how Google ranks the pages on your site. The part of understanding ranking is understanding the most popular ranking algorithm, which is PageRank.
PageRank is the main concept of Google’s ranking system and was developed by its founders. PageRank uses the link structure of the Internet to decide the quality of each page that appears in its index. The more quality links a page has pointing to it, the higher the number of serps that page will display. Therefore, increasing your PageRank is critical to moving up the servers and therefore receiving more traffic.
There are some important things to keep in mind about PageRank. The number of quality links you have pointing to your site is the main factor in determining your rank, however if the page the link is coming from has a lot of outbound links then the PR juice sent is much less. Another important thing to remember that most so-called SEO experts forget is that PR ranks pages, not entire websites, and the collective PR of all your subdomains will be part of your main domain calculation.
You can check your page rank simply by downloading the Google toolbar or using the free tools available online, however your true PR is something only Google knows and the more PR you get the harder it is to continue climbing the ladder.
Local Rank is a slightly different form of ranking algorithm. Local ranking simply evaluates the results of any given search and analyzes the pages to see who has the highest quality inbound links from the sites within that particular search result. Links from sites that are not within the search result do not play a role in local ranking.
Hilltop is another type of software that Google uses to help rank pages within the index. In a nutshell, Hilltop is software that distinguishes between authority and expert sites. Expert sites usually contain a lot of outbound links and authority sites have a lot of inbound links and always rank higher.
When performing SEO on your site, it is important to know the above in order to make your campaign more effective. If you are an SEO expert, you can use this information to modify your linking efforts and provide a more personalized linking structure.