Google PageRank: Where will you be when the Dust Settles?
April 17, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: Ranking
Well, it’s that time again, the magical moment where Google presses the big green go button and sends its engine off to recalculate the PageRank of every site on the World Wide Web. In case you don’t already know, every 3-4 months, on a regular but not exact schedule, Google updates the PageRank numbers that are visible on the Google Toolbar. The last update was in January and many signs seem to point to a PageRank update going on right now.
PageRank is Google’s way of ranking webpages on a scale of 0-10. The higher up you rank, the more credibility Google gives to your content. The PageRank formula is fairly complicated, and always changing. No one outside of Google knows exactly what goes into its calculation but the basics behind it are pretty straight forward. The one sentence summary is, the more sites out there that link to you without you linking back to them, the more important Google thinks that you are. That’s why things like removing the NoFollow attribute to your links can really help out your most frequent contributors.
Having a high PageRank can have some definite benefits for a site. For starters, many publishers and advertisers look to the PageRank as a way of determining status for a site. In fact, some advertising companies won’t even consider you until your PageRank has surpassed a certain threshold. Some sites make their entire living from their PageRank. Directory indexes and software repositories can make a fortune selling spots within their archives after reaching a PageRank of 5 or higher. Who wouldn’t pay a small fee to instantly get a backlink from a high ranked site?
In terms of Google itself, not too much is known in regards to how much stock is placed on the rank itself when determining your placement in search results. Many people seem to think that the higher your PageRank, the more relevant Google thinks you are for specific keywords and thus the higher your rank for said keywords. I am sure this is true to some extent, but I don’t imagine it is as straight forward as that. One thing is for sure, the more backlinks you have, the better off you will be. Backlinks are never bad.
There are some tools you can use to help you try and predict your PageRank as well as see how the current PageRank update is going in regards to your site. While an update is in progress, like it is right now, it is not uncommon for a sites PageRank to fluctuate all the time, so if your rank suddenly plummets to zero, don’t be too worried.
When Google finishes it’s latest update, where will you be? Bookmark Bliss currently has a PageRank of 2, but that is mostly a hold over from when this site used to be just a portal for my business. Since the last update, we’ve really changed the site a lot, and I’m hopeful our PageRank will increase this time around. I’m predicting a PageRank of 4, but that might be a bit optimistic.
So, where do you think you’re site will end up when the dust settles on this update? 2? 5? 10? I guess we’ll all find out soon enough 
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
Welcome
Make Money
10 people have left comments
I’m not seeing it. I checked several URLs that should be changing, including yours, but they’re all still the same across the board.
When I was checking things out yesterday for the article I found the results to be all over the board. Some sites predicted Fuzzy Future to be PR 6 some PR 2. I check those same sites today, and the numbers are all different.
From what I’ve read over at DigitalPoint, this update seems to be different from the norm for Google. I guess a lot of sites are having really strange fluctuations. I think that what could cause the problem is that Google has servers all over the world that are used to lookup rank. Probably depending on which one you end up querying and where it is in the current update, determines your rank on a given day.
Until the update is completely finished, you probably can’t take any of those numbers to mean really anything…
That’s what that Future PageRank tool is supposed to show, though. By querying each of the various datacenters, you’re able to watch the update propagate through them. It’s always entertaining
Interesting that you saw different results yesterday, though. Was that with the Future PageRank tool or one of the PageRank predictors?
yeah, a week or so ago, the future pagerank had me pegged at mostly zeros a few 4’s and one 2. Yesterday, I was mostly 3’s and 2’s. Today it is showing all 2’s. I bet Google is doing some crazy stuff.
I can’t seem to get the one at iwebtools to work for my sites — it says ‘cannot determine’ for both current and future. That seems odd because I have a PR of 5 and have had the same PR on both of my main sites for awhile.
Mine has stayed about the same (4). Same with my wife’s e-commerce site.
@Jaxia - I couldn’t get the iWebtools tool to work for me either.
Jaxia - the iwebtools is wacked, forget it. You are are a solid 5 and will probably stay their since you have not tried to sell out.
Search Google like this to get your site’s info (as they see it).
info:www.your-domain-name.com
Jaxia, in terms of PR, the links to stat is probably the most important. you have 367 links to your blog from other sites. This site has only 41. As long as you can keep getting good links in and not link out to bad sites you should be able to maintain or improve your PR.
This site needs to get its results out of the supplemental results. Using a description meta tag will help more than using a keywords plugin.
Sorry about that everyone, the iwebtools seemed to be working yesterday. I’ll just go ahead and remove the link.
@Joe - The LinksTo option is great at Google, but it is very infrequently updated for a site that is still in Google’s sandbox (like this site is). For the most sites, you won’t see many of the out links appear for months.
Yahoo Site Explorer is a little more accurate, even during the sandbox phase, but it is also out of date.
I know the importance of Google page ranking but have to admit I’ve never looked up mine. Guess I figured I wasn’t even on the scale yet. Now, however, I plan to check it out once it’s available.
Other than the Google toolbar, how else can someone find their page ranking?
Thanks for the information. I’ve just recently decided that I should probably pay attention to these things.