how does the Google Rankings tool work?

Answer by: George Kaloyanov, Aplus.Net Knowledge Base Support

The heart of the Google search engine is the PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. 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."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

With the Google Rankings tools you can check the most important Google measurments for your website:

Saturation: The number of indexed pages by Google for your entire website.
Back Links: The number of indexed pages of external websites which have links to your own website.
Google PageRank: A function of Google that measures the quality of a website on a scale of 0 to 10 based on various parameters including the "Saturation" and the "Back Links".

You can also compare your website's score with the competition and track changes by generating history reports.

Here’s how to use the Google Rankings tool:

Start by logging into the Aplus.Net Web Control Panel at http://cp.aplus.net using your Registration Number and Customer Password.
Select Web Hosting from the top navigation menu.
Next, select Hosted Domains and click on Manage Hosted Domains.
On the Web Sites Management page, select the domain that you’d like to manage.
Click on the Marketing tab.
Select the Google Rankings icon.
Specify the URL / Website that you’d like to check the Google Rankings for:

Your main website should be already set in the Main URL field.
Use the optional Subdomain drop-down menu if you'd like to check the Google Rankings of a specific subdomain of yours.
Use the optional Location field if you'd like to check the Google Rankings of a specific page of yours.
Use the www. prefix checkbox to either add or remove the www to/from the URL.
You can use the Previous Records drop-down menu to quickly select a URL which was already checked on a previous occasion.

The tool will allow you to add up to 4 URLs for comparison with your own. You can add external URLs as well as URLs originating from your own website.
Click the Check button to see your website’s current Google Rankings along with the rankings of the URLs you might have entered for comparison.