This is a simple PageRank (Link Juice) flow simulator, based on the available information on how Google calculates their PageRank. It helps understand how well your website circulates PageRank and how much of it you are wasting away. To use it:
- Construct the Links Table (below) of the website (or a manageable sample of it) that you want to simulate. You can add more pages to the Links Table as needed. And then mark the checkboxes for every existing link from the linking page (row) to the destination (column).
- Enter the amount of PageRank coming to the different pages within their “Inbound” column. PageRank is a relative measure, so what matters are the proportions pointed at the different pages, rather than the absolute figures. Or you can just start with entering 1 for your homepage and leaving the rest empty.
- Enter the number of “Leaking” links present on every page in their “Leaks” column. This is the sum of links with nofollow tags, links to pages disallowed within robots.txt, links to dead-end pages and external links (whilst there are often important reasons to have external links on your website, on a technical level they waste as much of your PageRank as other “Leaking” links).
- Press “Calculate” and the graph under the table will show, in blue, the PageRank level accumulated by your Homepage after 20 iterations of PageRank calculation. PageRank is an iterative algorithm thus the level of PageRank accumulating on every one of your pages grows every iteration. As you can see the PageRank growth levels off towards the 20th iteration at which we stop the propagation. Google is thought to run their calculations for between 20 & 50 times.
- Now edit your link graph, adding or removing internal links or modifying the number of leaks present on the different pages.
- Press “Calculate” again and the graph will draw the new PageRank level for your Homepage in blue and the level achieved in the last calculation will appear in grey. The gap between the blue and the grey lines is the amount of PageRank (Link Juice) you gained or wasted with the latest changes to your link graph.
Add more pages:
I was shocked when I understood how much PageRank (Link Juice) we gain and lose through our linking structures and I hope you found this calculator interesting too.