Posted ByjagdeeshThe Google PageRank Toolbar in SEO circles is a hotly debated item,
as are most issues dealing with Google. Some say it’s useless, others say it gives you a general overview of your site’s standing in Google. Regardless of who is right, this Toolbar shouldn’t be ignored nor worshipped, just closely watched.
The Google PR Toolbar is a simple tool you can download and place on your browser. When you surf the web, this toolbar will give you Google’s PR or Page Rank for that particular site or page. Google ranks all web pages from a scale of 0 to 10. This Toolbar is more like the Richter scale than an ordinary scale, there’s a big difference in the rankings as you go up and they are not proportional.
You must also realize each of these ranking points are further divided and only Google knows the exact placement of your site or page within your shown PR number. For example, if you have a PR6 site your site could be at low end of the PR6 scale (closer to PR5) or at the top end which would make it more of a PR7 site. Big difference.
* PageRank Confusion
Many suggest Google is not giving us the real value of the page in the first place and this toolbar is often out of date and more of a smokescreen than real information about a site. There could be some truth in this as Google never gives up all its secrets. Does any company? Certainly not the company that holds the keys to the most powerful economic force on the planet: the Internet.
Complicating matters even further are webmasters and marketers who try to manipulate their own PageRank by buying or exchanging links with other high PR sites. Many are now doing Three-Way linking to try to influence their site’s rankings in Google.
A whole SEO industry has been built up around PageRank for the simple reason the stakes are extremely high. If you can deliver first place rankings for your client’s targeted keywords in Google it means free organic traffic or visitors delivered directly to your site.
Many SEO experts believe Google has a whole list of ranking factors which determine how well your page is ranked. Among others, these ranking factors include Google’s PageRank algorithm (voting system) and Hypertext-Matching Analysis (analyzing page content).
* Google’s Position
If you check out Google’s own corporate site for an explanation you will find that Google clearly states its patented PageRank™ algorithm is the heart of their web ranking system which was founded by Larry Page & Sergey Brin in 1998. You will also find that Google says it uses numerous factors including PageRank to examine the whole web and find the most relevant and important pages to match a specific search.
PageRank takes into consideration over “500 million variables and 2 billion terms” when finding the most important pages. Google makes it clear that each page casts a vote for another page and this is reflected in the PageRank. Votes from particular sites or pages might have greater value than others. “Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results.”