G Dewald
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G. Dewald is Director of Web Strategy for Union Street Media.

Google Pagerank Toolbar update

This is for the SEO geeks among us. But it appears that Google has updated the Toolbar Pagerank this past weekend. I’m happy to note that the Union Street Media site is holding steady, that this blog debuted favorably and that our internal pages, like our real estate web design page, are also now earning more Pagerank than previously.

I’ll go into a little more detail about PageRank for those internet marketing folks who are just getting into SEO and all that after the break.

Uhh, what’s Page Rank?

Blue water pail

Image by susiepie via Flickr

Pagerank, commonly shortened to PR, is one of the pieces of Google’s algorithm. Every page in Google’s index has an assigned PR from 1 to 10. Pagerank is supposed to indicated a page’s value: an indicator of inbound links, length of existence etc.

Having a high PageRank won’t necessarily have an impact on your placement on the search engine results page (SERP). This is what confuses most people when trying to understand PageRank. PageRank flows from your site out through any links you have to another site.

You can imagine it, perhaps, as a bucket with some water in it. Every link in your site is a hole in the bucket out of which water leaks. The amount of holes in your bucket is up to you. The amount of water in your bucket is Google’s PageRank.

So what should I do about PageRank?

Here are two things you can do with your knowledge of PageRank:

  • Identify sites with high PageRank and try to get links to your site from them.
  • Identify pages on your site with high PageRank and link out to other sites/pages that you think are good.

I’ll admit that’s not much to go on. Mostly, use PageRank as a way to help you allocate your resources for locating and gaining inbound links as well as promoting your favorite links. If you get really fancy with this, eventually you’ll get into a discipline called Pagerank Sculpting.

But all of this Pagerank business aside, if you consistently focus on making good content that people find useful you won’t ever really have to know much about Pagerank. It will just come your way.

6 thoughts on “Google Pagerank Toolbar update”

  1. Man to think I just launched my website, http://www.puredezigner.com back in the middle of July 2008. I remember reading about the PR updates that were taking place at the end of the July, that’s when I was thinking to myself, man 3-6 months before the next update. But when I check my Alexa stat this evening I noticed something else. I just now finally had an update to my PR, From PR0 to PR3! It’s a simple website based on CSS and XHTML validated web projects I have in my portfolio, non the less, I am very happy about this update to my first ever SEO efforts in web. I’d love to see examples and reports on how your current SEO efforts are going and possible results from from the latest Google PR update, please share your updates with us?

    Thanks,
    Curtis

  2. Hi Curtis,

    Congrats on your first PR ranking! Having good code helps a great deal with Google in general. Not so sure how much it matters for PageRank in general, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

    Our current SEO efforts are going fairly well but I don’t really think that this is a result of PageRank so much as it is active participation in relevant social media sites, an increase in content that generates backlinks and being very clear and defined about what search terms I’m shooting at. I think if you focus on those things first, you’ll worry less and less about PageRank.

    Take care,
    g

  3. G,

    Thanks for the reminder on Google’s PR. I enjoyed using it when I had a PC but once I made the plunge to a mac at work I lost that tool. Your post nudged me to look into that again and I found that Firefox 3.03 for mac has a plugin for PR so I have it back again.

    We were 3/10 back in May but since USM we are now 4/10. It was interesting to me that pages we rank high for in terms of traffic (in Google Analytics) show less than stellar PR.

    Thanks for the heads up G.

    Sean

    How about a post someday on RedZee or some of the other less known SE’s and what–if any–relevance they should be for us. RedZee caught me in a weak moment and we now have a PPC account. No real results yet….

  4. Sean,

    I think your results for RedZee speak for themselves. You’re not the only real estate person they’ve contacted. I have yet to hear of anyone having different results than you.

    If you’re looking to target other search engines I have to say that Yahoo! tends to deliver a great audience, at least in terms of engagement.

    Dig into your traffic sources report and locate the engines/referrals that are converting the most by percentage. This will tell you what kind of traffic you want to increase. Hmmm I feel another blog post coming on.

    As for articles with lower PR ranking better in the SERPS, that’s one more reason to value making good content over PR. PR will affect the pages linked to from the high PR page, but not its own ranking.

    Maybe next time there’s a PR update I’ll take the time to make the be-all-end-all Google PR update post.

  6. Nice Pagerank checker Checkpagerank! I like how quick it is and the little additional touches like domain age etc. Great for a quick assessment when you don’t want to take the time to run a Website Grade on someone.

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