Google recently updated their toolbar pagerank (January ’07). Immediately, webmasters from around the globe started posting in forums that either their pagerank (pr) stayed at zero or didn’t move even though they’ve been getting backlinks to their sites. Here are a few quick thoughts about that…

First pagerank is generated by Google and is always several months out of date - Google is just finishing up a new pagerank/backlinks update but even so, the data that they are showing is several months old. They do that on purpose, they really don’t want webmasters obsessing about page rank.

Next, if you’re still concerned about the PR of your site, I’d recommend signing up for Google webmaster tools (it’s free) Webmaster Tools In there they have a pagerank tool, under “Crawl stats” that tells you, in general terms, where your Pagerank is. Note: Google has said that this tool is much more accurate then the pagerank on the tool bar.

Now, just having links doesn’t mean you’re getting pagerank. Google is wise to most of the tricks that we (webmasters) have used in the past to boost pr and has discounted a lot of it. Also, lots of times webmasters use certain tricks that keep pagerank from passing to their link partners - (nofollow tag, using redirects instead of linking directly to the page) and unless you look closely you probably won’t see it.

Try the Google link query to see what Google is seeing as far as links go, use the following:

link:www.YourDomain.com

This query will return (some of) the links that Google sees pointing to your site.

Also use:

site:www.YourDomain.com

to see how many of your pages are indexed.

Lastly, try to forget about pagerank and just build good content for your blog –that’s what ALL the search engines want and they reward those sites that have it —-regardless of what their Pagerank may be.

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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