• What is Google PageRank?
• Why is Google PageRank important?

Anyway, just today I was wondering how many websites are there with PageRank 10 (out of 10) as of Google’s last PageRank update. To my surprise I’ve found only 3. A few of the PageRank 10 websites like Adobe have lost their PageRank 10 position. Here’re the 3 sites with PageRank 10:

• http://www.usa.gov/
• http://www.google.com/
• http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

There’s so much talk about PageRank not being as important as it used to be. Well, I too agree to it to a degree but not entirely. And the reason for this article is to tell you why I don’t agree.

We know Google analyzes 200+ elements of a webpage while crawling and returning a result for a given search term and PageRank is one of them. While PR may not be the only player that Google considers most but it is still the most important player of all. Why? Soon you’ll find out.

When most of us talk about PageRank for a website we talk about its effect on site’s ranking. But when I talk about PageRank I talk about awareness, credibility and ranking.

Awareness

Awareness can come from many different sources and one of them can be search engine. In this Web 2.0 era search engine isn’t the only means of getting awareness; social networking and bookmarking are having a major part in online awareness.  Once you get some exposure from any of these resources if your website has a higher PageRank along with some good content you’re sure to get awareness in the community. Not to mention you’ll get a good response from the advertisers if you’ve a site with a high PageRank.

Credibility

From my experience what I’ve found is that websites with higher PageRank trend to get more credibility than the websites with lower PageRank. I am sure the first thing a webmaster look at when they go to a site is the PageRank of that site. Of course the content of the site has to worth your time but good content along with a good PageRank is bound to give good credibility and bring back repetitive visitors. Though it may sometimes vary depending on your niche.

Ranking

Let’s face it. You’ll try your life out to rank your site for something if your site doesn’t have any PageRank. Unless you’re optimizing your site for something that you’ll only search and has a competition of few hundreds or thousands. Not to mention any updated content on your site has to wait for Google’s periodic update to get indexed. And if your regularly updated content isn’t indexed by Google on a regular basis then your site won’t be found let along being ranked.

Ever wondered why a full article or a page from examplesite.com was indexed as soon as that was published but yours wasn’t.  What magic do you think that site is using to get their pages indexed within minutes of publishing? Well, I am sure now you know the answer.

Google indexes pages of sites with PageRank (minimum of 2/10) within minutes of publishing. Where as the sites with NO PageRank has to wait for Google’s periodic update to get fully indexed. Well there’re other ways to index pages of site that have no PageRank. If you’re a webmaster then I am sure you know how.

So now you know why PageRank is still very much important. No matter whether you’re running a blog or a product site, PageRank is one of the most important elements that you should look at growing.
Do you think I’ve missed something? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

What is Google PageRank™ or PR?

PageRank™ is Google’s patented algorithm which analyzes which sites have been “voted” the best sources of information by other pages across the web. Simply put, Google PageRank™ is a way of measuring the weight or importance of a webpage on the web. While Google justifies more than 200 factors of a webpage to find the most relevant results for a given search query, PageRank™ is one of the most important factors that Google takes into consideration. Google is always conservative when it comes to their core technology and the PageRank™ is no exception to that. Here’s a reference to PageRank™ on Google’s Technology page:

PageRank™ Technology: PageRank™ reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank™ and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank™ also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

How does PageRank™ Work?

I won’t go into the full mathematical explanation of how the PageRank™ technology works. Simply, PageRank™ is calculated based on linking strategy which Google calls “a voting system”. So when a webpage links to another webpage, that first webpage is basically voting for the second webpage giving that webpage a priority among the other webpages. It’s not as simple or easy as I may have made it sound but that’s what it is in a nut shell.

Google describes this as:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

As you can see links from “important” webpages pass higher value to the linked pages. And how’s the importance of a webpage calculated? Again, by its PR. So it’s the quality of votes or links that matters not the volume of votes or links. This is a common misconception among the webmasters.

The links can work both good and bad ways for you. While good backward links help you get higher PR and may help you rank higher in the SEPRs (remember, Google uses 200 other factors to return a relevant webpage), the bad links can get you penalized by Google. So think twice or do your research before getting a link from another site to get a PR push. I will discuss about this in more details some other time as this requires its own topic.

If you were interested to see the PageRank algorithm then check out the Wikipedia page for PageRank.

Difference between internal PageRank and Toolbar PageRank

Internal PageRank is the PageRank of your internal pages that hasen’t been passed onto the toolbar PageRank yet. If your webpage is indexed then it’s very likely that Google has assigned a PageRank to it. It could be anywhere in the PageRank scale of 0-10. And this PageRank gets passed onto the Toolbar PageRank and becomes visible to everyone when Google updates their PageRank once every few months. As Matt Cutts explained:

PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users.

Does PageRank update gives you an instant push in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?

No. Why? Because as explained before, those PageRanks were already incorporated into your site and have been gradually affecting your sites performance in the Search Engines since the last PageRank update. It’s just that they weren’t visible in the toolbar up until the PageRank update. As Matt Cutts said:

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.

But, there’s a twist here. Though the PageRank update won’t give instant kick to your SERPs, you will have greater chance of being listed higher in the SERPs for any consecutive content update. Check out this “Why is Google PageRank or PR Important?” article to understand why and how.

How can you check the PageRank of a website?

This is how PageRank of a website looks:

You can check the PageRank of your website with this PageRank Checker from our SEO Tools section.

Or you can also check your PageRank by installing Google Toolbar for your browser. Once installed, your browser will restart and Google Toolbar plugin will be added to your browser. After this whenever you go to a website, Google PageRank bar on the toolbar will show the PageRank of that webpage like the one on the image above.

I’ve tried to explain it precisely but very clearly for everyone to understand what PageRank is and how it works. But if you have any question or if you think I’ve missed something here then please leave your message in the comments below.

WordPress 2.7 is about to be released on WordPress.com. The new WordPress will go live today the December 4, 2008 at 8pm Eastern Time. I am really excited to try out WordPress 2.7 as you know the new version had a complete facelift along with a lot of additional features.

The new WordPress is supposed to improve user experience because of its extensive use of JavaScript. Which means modules and features will load way faster then its predecessors. And apparently (but not surprisingly) the new WordPress will work better in latest Firefox version 3 and Google Chrome. There you go, IE has been left out again. And because of the extensive use of JavaScript, users have been asked to use the latest browser and to make sure the JavaScript is turned on their browser to get the optimal experience.

A note on browser capabilities: WordPress 2.7 makes extensive use of JavaScript to create the user experience outlined here. If you have JavaScript turned off in your browser, some features may not be available or may work a bit differently than described here. In addition, using a recent standards-compliant browser will ensure that you have an optimal experience. Older browsers that are not supported by their manufacturers any longer may not look as expected; we recommend Firefox 3 and Google Chrome.

We’ll see how the performance differs once we get to test it real time. You can check the full features list on WordPress.com.

Is it how it’s supposed to be working or I am missing something here? Even if the time was published based on the Group’s Country then it would’ve been 5 hours behind mine, NOT tomorrow.  So to me it looks like Facebook’s Group commenting system has a glicth hence it’s travelling ahead of time and needs fixing ASAP.

To check yours, just go to this ColorBlindMe website and put the URL and you’ll see what a color blind person will see on your website.

Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Though it’s a very rare case for Google but it also proves that Google isn’t also bullet proof. Now, I’ll just wait and see how long it takes for Gmail to come back live.

An Australian man named David Thorne AKA “Spider Man” has recently made world wide news while trying to pay his outstanding bill with a 7 legged Spider.

When asked to pay his outstanding bill by the utility company, David tried to pay his debt by sending a drawing of a 7 legged spider. I am sure it was nothing but a joke from his end, but looks like the operator on the other side took it quite seriously. The full conversation is listed below.

While I found the whole conversation quite hilarious, the news of the actual drawing being listed on eBay and almost sold for US10,000 was an over the top news for me. Unfortunate for the seller, the buyer was also having some fun and has no intention to pay for it what so ever.

Here’s the email:

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Thankyou for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.32am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please.

Regards, David.
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.42am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear David,
You emailed the drawing to me. Do you want me to email it back to you?

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.56am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Yes please.

Regards, David.
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 12.14pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Attached

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 09.22am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Whose spider is that?

Dear Jane, Are you sure this drawing of a spider is the one I sent you? This spider only has seven legs and I do not feel I would have made such an elementary mistake when I drew it.

Regards, David.
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.03am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, Yes it is the same drawing. I copied and pasted it from the email you sent me on the 8th. David your account is still overdue by the amount of $233.95. Please make this payment as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.05am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Automated Out of Office Response

Thankyou for contacting me. I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week.

Regards, David.
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.08am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Hello, I am back and have read through your emails and accept that despite missing a leg, that drawing of a spider may indeed be the one I sent you. I realise with hindsight that it is possible you rejected the drawing of a spider due to this obvious limb ommission but did not point it out in an effort to avoid hurting my feelings. As such, I am sending you a revised drawing with the correct number of legs as full payment for any amount outstanding. I trust this will bring the matter to a conclusion.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 2.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, As I have stated, we do not accept drawings in lei of money for accounts outstanding. We accept cheque, bank cheque, money order or cash. Please make a payment this week to avoid incurring any additional fees.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 3.17pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

I understand and will definately make a payment this week if I remember. As you have not accepted my second drawing as payment, please return the drawing to me as soon as possible. It was silly of me to assume I could provide you with something of completely no value whatsoever, waste your time and then attach such a large amount to it.

Regards, David.
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Tuesday 14 Oct 2008 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Attached

Source: Ninemsn News

Anyway, with that announcement and with the help of a Read Green campaign, you can now get a Free digital copy of PC Magazine or any of the 16 other popular magazines for a whole year.

To subscribe for your Free copy you’ve to register at Zinio just by provide your email address and a password. Completely hassle free. Here’s the list of Magazines that you can subscribe to. You can click on any of the titles below to go directly to the subscription page or you can check them out here first and subscribe from there as well. Your free copy of any of these magazines will be emailed to you as soon as they become available every month. Now, that’s cool!

• PC Magazine
• Men’s Journal
• Parenting
• Technology Review
• Shutter Bag
• Reader’s Digest
• Popular Science
• VIV
• US News
• Saveur
• Rock Pop
• Penthouse
• Outside
• Black Book
• Black Enterprise
• Motor Trend

You’re entitled to get only one of these magazines. But if you’re a bit cheeky then you can subscribe to more. I am sure you know how to do that now that you’ve more than one email address ;).

All your personalized search informations will be stored in your Google account. So once you make a change for something, you’ll always see the same set of results when you come back and search for the same thing. You can obviously reset everything if you want.

As interesting as it may sound, I just don’t see any real use of it. I mean I can see myself using iGoogle to personalize my dashboard but personalizing search result! I don’t see myself using that feature/service at all. Because if I am searhing for something I am always looking for fresh information.

The main concerning matter here though is this feature will not help webmasters at all. In fact this is going to harm SEOs in the long term if everyone starts using it aggressively. Because no matter how hard you will try to push your new website up the ladder, you site will not be shown to the SearchWiki users as they’ve already customized their search results for that particular search term. Very concerning if you ask me.

Here’s a video demonstration by a Googler.