What is an authority site?
If you are looking for advice in the real world on something like, rasing your kids perhaps, you would probably ask your Mom. After all, your Mom is the expert, or the "authority" in your eyes, correct?
An authority website, is a site that can be trusted to give you exactly what you're looking for. (It's not necessarily always the first result in the search engines).
You can usually tell whether a website is or isn't an authority site by it's Page Rank and Alexa ranking. Although for the past couple of years Google has been very slow at updating the Google page rank that shows up at the top of web browser tool bars, you can be assured that each and every web page or blog post that's published on the internet, does in fact, have page rank!
What Is Page Rank?
Internet webpages are graded on a scale of "n/a" to 10. "NA" means that either it's a fairly new website, or else it doesn't have enough "importance" to even grade it. Any website that has a PR, (page rank) of 10, is not only an authority site, it is a very important website to a large number of people.
As of writing this page, Google.com has a PR7, Google+ is at PR7, and Facebook is at PR9. So knowing how important these websites are to some people, this should give you a bit of an idea how important page rank can be!
What Is Alexa Ranking?
Alexa ranking is a little bit different and it can change on a daily basis. What Alexa does is rate the importance of a website on a global scale.
There can only be one website on any given day, that has the Alexa ranking of 1. Whichever website has an Alexa rank of 1, is considered to be the most important website in existence on that day.
When a website is brand new, it usually doesn't have an Alexa rank that can be measured. When Alexa does find them, they are usually designated an Alexa rank of 20,000,000 or even higher. As content is added, this starts to drop.
Think of it this way,... there are 10's of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of websites online these days. What would it take to become #1?
It would take a lot to create the most important website in existence, right?
How Can You Find Out Your Page Rank & Alexa Rank?
Alexa.com keeps track of a lot of online statistics, although they don't give out as much information for free as they used to.
Personally I use certain "add ons", also known as "extensions" that can be added to your web browsers tool bar. There are plenty of free add ons that you can get for any web browser.
Understanding Alexa, Page Rank, and Authority websites will help you in the modern day world of search engine optimization.
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