April 8th, 2010 by Nick

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Over the weekend Google updated its PageRank importance score for websites. Avvo’s score remained a 7/10.  Do you know your score? If not, learn how to find out your website’s PageRank and what it means for your business.

Three kinds of PageRank

PageRank is a term that can refer to three different things which are often confused.  Here’s an explanation:

1)    “PageRank”

When Google was founded it had a novel way of ranking websites.  Rather than just searching for keywords on a page, it treated the internet as a democracy, where links between websites counted as votes.  Google co-founder Larry Page called this democratic score of your website’s importance “PageRank.”   There is no way to know a web page’s real PageRank.  This score is updated all the time and is kept secret by Google.

2)    “Toolbar PageRank”

Although Google won’t tell you your website’s real PageRank, they will give a glimpse into it, on a page-by-page basis, with toolbar PageRank.  To see this, you have to download the Google Toolbar for your web browser.  Once you do this, you can see the 0-10 toolbar PageRank score of any web page on the Internet.  No one is sure what exactly this score means or how it’s calculated, but we do know it’s “Google’s view of the importance of [a web page].”  This score is updated every few months.

3)    “Page rank”

Sometimes people refer to “page rank” to mean where a website ranks in Google for a given keyword.  This isn’t a term of art.  It’s just a common way of describing how a “page ranks”in Google.  Unfortunately, “page rank” is often confused with PageRank.

How to find out your website’s Toolbar PageRank

To find out your website’s toolbar PageRank, you need to download the Google Toolbar for your browser.  Once installed, just make sure that you have the toolbar turned on in your option settings.

Then, to see the PageRank of a given web page, go to it in your browser and hover your mouse over the PageRank green bar.

So what does Toolbar PageRank ultimately mean?

Some people argue toolbar PageRank means nothing, since it doesn’t necessarily translate into high rankings, satisfied users or money in the bank.  But in my opinion, and apparently in Conrad’s, toolbar PageRank isn’t meaningless.

Although imperfect, it’s one of the few metrics we have directly from Google’s mouth.  And in the SEO world full of voodoo and conjecture, having an objective, authoritative way to measure your website’s importance and your competitors’ is a useful thing.  It just shouldn’t be obsessed over.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 10:52 am by Nick and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.