All you ever wanted to know about PageRank
As the proud owner of one or several blogs, you certainly have already checked the Google PageRank of your home page. After all, it’s important to know how you’re rated by Google to be sure to appear in the first pages of results served by the search engine to people looking at a theme you’ve written about. But today, let’s also look at tools which can give you the PageRank score for all of your pages — and even the ones of the sources you mention in your posts. Read more…
But before going further, what is PageRank? It’s an algorithm invented by Google’s founders and which rates Web pages from 0 to 10, 10 being the highest score. Here is a short explanation from Google.
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.”
For far more detailed information, please read what says Wikipedia about PageRank.
And if you want to know who gets the highest scores on PageRank, you can check this list, which is only informative. But it’s interesting to note that on the 17 sites which obtain a perfect 10, two are owned by Google, Blogger and Google itself. You’ll find other well-known names, such as the New York Times or Apple, but probably not your blog.
But it’s time to tell you about two tools I’ve discovered while reading a recent post from Fred Cavazza (in French), one from Webmaster Eyes and one from seobench.
Both are equally easy to use. You give them an URL — such as your home page — and these services will display a PageRank score for all the links appearing on the page you submitted.
And if you want to know only about the PageRank score of your site or one of your competitors, remember that Google has also a free tool for this, its Google Toolbar, available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Finally, are these tools useful or not? In my humble opinion (IMHO), they’re at the same time useful and entertaining. What’s your take?
