Although I’m an SEO consultant who deals mainly with Google (it’s THE most important search engine) until watching a recent episode of the Dragon’s Den (TV program on BBC2) I’d not come across the term Google Consultant before.

The Dragon’s Den is a TV program where entrepreneurs/inventors pitch their businesses to a group of successful angel investors hoping to secure investment for a share of their business. In this particular episode someone was pitching something called StoryCode which is basically a book review service that is able to match similar books together, making it easier to purchase similar genres of books you previously read and liked.

PageRank (PR) confuses a lot of webmasters and SEO Consultants. Another SEO asked me in the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines why the site www.statcounter.com is PR10 despite having a lot of external links on the home page, basically why isn’t the leaked PR damaging the sites PR10 home page (the SEO consultant doesn’t believe PR leaks).

The SEO in question has misunderstood PageRank and how PR leaks from a site. Going to give a relatively simple explanation with what I hope is easy to understand maths.

How PR works

Every page has intrinsic PR, for ease of maths lets imagine every NEW page with no links to it has 1 PR point (not PR1, but an arbitrary unit we are calling PR points). This is intrinsic PR, our starting point for all those PR10 pages out there