Find PageRank Score For Your Website And Competitor Sites
May 6th, 2009I recently conducted a website review and wrote the resulting report for an old manager to help him provide consultation to his newly acquired client. He found the information quite useful and wanted to know where I got some of the competitor benchmark statistics from.
One of which was PageRank score. For those of you who are new to SEO, PageRank is a score given by Google to every web page on the planet. It provides an indication of the level of authority the site has compared with other websites. It is one indicator among hundreds of others that helps Google to determine what pages should rank within their search results.
Google PageRank score ranges from 0 to 10 and works very similar to the Richter scale. The higher the score, the wider the gap is between the previous score. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm and it is accumulated by external links pointing to your website. Each link to a website is considered a vote and passes PageRank value from that site to its recipient.
To build PageRank for your site, it takes consistent effort over a number of years to achieve.
Only a few years ago, PageRank score was predominant in Google ranking websites, until SEO marketers started abusing the system. SEO marketers started buying links, a form of manipulation, in order to make their way to the top of search results. Since Google saw this as a violation of their rules, they have added various other indicators to help them in their quest to provide the closest, most relevant match to the user’s search query and to penalize those marketers that covertly manoeuvre search results.
Even though many SEOs have abused PageRank and overly obsessed about it, it is still an important indicator of a website’s performance.
To find the PageRank score for your site or that of your competitors, you can either use an external tool to look it up or download a plug-in for your browser so that it is always on display when you visit websites.
PageRank Look-up Resources are:
Google Toolbar: (can be used within Windows Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers)
SEO Chat – PageRank Lookup Tool
