The next Google Page Rank Update should occur within the next week which will create a stir on most webmaster forums. Why though is Page Rank so important to many? Many webmasters generate their entire income from Page Rank. Google may well state that webmasters should not sell links on their sites but the reality is that Google itself has created most of the link selling market. As I have said before most webmaster only use Page Rank plus perhaps the number of outbound links to determine the quality of urls. This is of course a big mistake.
Since the conception of Page Rank many webmasters simply build sites with the sole intention of gaining a decent Page Ranks so they can sell links. I know of many webmasters making a good living from link sales alone. I also have witness some links sold for unbelievable prices. In my book Google has created a monster. It is clear that no matter what Google states in regards to links sales they have no chance of stopping the link sale gravy train whilst visible Page Rank exists. As you may have already guessed I would like to see Google scrap its Page Rank system.
Just imagine that tomorrow Google did indeed scrap Page Rank. What metrics would you use to gauge the quality of sites and their internal pages? Let me tell you that if most webmasters ignored Page Rank, instead judging the quality of sites using other metrics than PR, then they would be able to find far better sites for back links.
So that’s my rant over let’s get back to the real world as I simply can’t see Google scraping Page Rank in the near future.
How To Monitor Page Rank
Many new webmaster are confused in regards to all the fuss about page rank so let’s cover the basics. To see the page rank of any webpage you can either visit a page rank checking site such as www.checkpagerank or add a tool to your browser so that for every page you can see page rank. I prefer to use the Firefox add on SEO Status Page Rank / Alexa Toolbar. This add-on loads a visible toolbar on every page I visit. See below.
As you can see the toolbar displays Page Rank and Alexa plus has an option to check a sites back links with just one click. It also has an option to Dig Page Rank which is the ability to see sites Page Rank on dozens of different Google Date Centres. The Dig PR option is only really useful when Google is exporting new Page Rank values. At first the new values only appear on one or two data centres thus the need for the Dig PR option. If you use the Dig PR option during a Page Rank export you will at first see one or two data centres with different values. These values are in effect the sites new Page Rank score. Within 48 hours the new values are spread to all data centres.
