It’s that time again: Google PageRank rollout. Many of us were expecting it’d be done at the end of July, but since the changeover typically happens on a weekend, and since it didn’t happen last weekend, the next best guess would be this coming weekend. Everyone who tends to do so will want to be measuring their own PR.
When the PR rollout does happen, some bloggers will rejoice, some will wail, and others will say “meh”. Love it or not, Google’s PageRank metric does gauge something about your website or weblog – mostly about your incoming links, with several other factors added on to detect “good” things such as “natural” link growth or “bad” things such as naughty backlinking schemes, etc. And several ad networks use it gauge how much you should be paid for your blog whoring activities. (Hey, I do it too.)
Now PR (Google PageRank), if you’re not familiar with it, is a measure that big G came up with a few years back to tell you how important (or not) your website is. And as would be expected, lots of little blogger boys and girls tried to game their PR. Others just wondered how to do that or even just to determine that Golden measure. I mean, if you’re not using Internet Explorer (no truly serious, aspiring pro blogger should), you don’t have the benefit of the official Google Toolbar with PR indicator.
There are number of other options available for checking PR, including Smart PageRank. Smart PageRank’s service works like this. If your site’s URL has enough data for it stored in the various Google data centers around the world, Smart PageRank returns it – both for the www version and the non-www. it also provides some other information:
- Your site’s value, based on their own formula. Obviously, this is mostly for amusement. What you think your site is worth is rarely the same as what a potential buyer might feel. Plus, a site’s value often depends on non-public factors like revenue.
- Whether a claimed PR for a site is fake or real. This is useful if you are buying a domain name with supposed PR. There are ways to fake PR, and unethical domain sellers don’t tell you this. Unfortunately, there are a couple of pagerank tools that are completely unreliable, but buyers and sellers at SitePoint Marketplace and other domain/ site auction sites use them, not knowing any better.
- The number of backlinks to your site, according to Google, Yahoo, and others.
- The number of pages on your site indexed by Google, Yahoo, etc.
- Buttons for display your PR, etc.
They also have:
- A backlinks analyzer that lists the URLs of pages elsewhere that link to you, and what the PR of that page is. If you want to know whether each linking page uses “NoFollow”, that option is available. The Backlinks analyzer itself is worth your time to try.
- A Firefox extension, the Smart Toolbar, which I’m assuming works similarly to the SearchStatus extension. (Time did not permit to try this.)
- A suite of other SEO tools including domain lookup, whois, bookmarklets and more.
They do not, however, have a PR predictor tool – although many of these are not particularly reliable anyway. There are other ways to estimate future PR on your own, which I hope to cover here eventually. Have a look at Smart PageRank for the present time. Don’t forget to check your pages before and after the new Google PR rollout – which should be happening very soon.
15 thoughts on “Smart PageRank Review”
ta herramienta es genial se puede comprobar el valor Pagerank, el dato del ranking de Alexa, los links que apuntan a tu página en los buscadores como Google, Yahoo y muchos mas, y entre otras cosas muy importante como el valor de tu web lo que puede costar aproximadamente.
Saludos.
By default, Firefox 3 prevents users from installing any extensions that do not offer a secure connection for automatic updates. This prevents users from being victims of hijacked update URLs.
But for developers or people installing extensions they know they can trust, it is a pain.
Luckily it is easily disabled by:
1. Enter ‘ about:config ’ into address bar, hit go
2. Right click somewhere in the list of keys below. Select New->Boolean
3. Enter ‘ extensions.checkUpdateSecurity ‘ as the name
4. Select false as the value
5. Reattempt installation of your plugin.
It worked for me for a Smart Toolbar add-in applet. Don’t type ‘ symbols!
With the new version of firefox for some reason my old installtion of pagerank tool doesn’t work. When I try to install the pagerank tools again it keeps complaining that can not be installed “Does not provide secure updates”. Has anybody got this message?
Thanks
Chuck232: Sort of. Their algorithm definitely favors sites that have a high root domain authority, so subdomains may benefit, too. However, a directory is said to favor more (over a subdomain) from a root domain’s PR.
But of course, who knows what factors really lurk in the big G algo?
I usually pay little to no attention to my Google Page Rank, but reading this article got me a bit interested, so I did some research on mine. My personal site has a PR of 4, but what was more interesting was the fact that two of my friends’ Blogspot blogs (that linked to me) had PRs of 5. Those two blogs in specific have very little in the way of backlinks or lots of content indexed by Google and the other search engines. In fact, Smart PageRank points out that they have too little traffic for an Alexa ranking at all, and almost all the links to their site were from mine, as I have them on my blogroll.
I found that rather curious – I wonder if Google biases the Page Ranks towards their own properties? (Such as Blogspot) At least my informal investigation would seem to point to that.
Isn’t that the site that started off as nothing but a rippoff clone of DNScoop?
Funny. Ha. That’s exactly right.
Note that I care about my blogs PR but I’ve been checking my PR everyday (everyhour??) at the following site.
digpagerank.com
It gets the data from multiple DCs so you can see when changes start to occur. Usually the PR starts to update at one DC and spread to other ones.
Again I don’t care about my sites PR. Sorry time to log out and check my PR again.
I’m not convinced that the update has started.
Lingum: until Google’s data centers have been completely updated, you might see some fluctuation. But don’t forget that they update their algorithm each round and cause grief for many of us. Hopefully that’s not the case for you.
Hmm..well it seems like pagerank went down for a lot of sites I checked, wonder why?
Raj,
SmartPageRank is actually the primary tool I use these days for SEO analysis. The backlinks analyzer is priceless. Especially when used from the Firefox toolbar. Whatever site your on, it takes only one click and you’ve go a fairly good take on its backlink strength.
Thank-you for the information. Smart Page rank seems better than the ones I have been using.
Pinyo, there are several places. Here are a few I like:
(1) Performancing Blogs for Sale forum.
(2) SitePoint Marketplace.
(3) Digital Point Forums Marketplace – Domains thread.
Raj, thank you for the link to Smart PageRank, it’s pretty cool. Do you happen to know where is the best place to put your domain name up for sale? I have a domain name that is no longer hosted, but still have PR5 and a whole bunch of backlinks.
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