You may have noticed that there’s been a Google Toolbar PageRank update this week, Google updates the PageRank of sites all the time but only updates what’s it displays in the toolbar every few months.
Whats PageRank?
PageRank is the logarithmic scale used by Google to assign a rating to a website. Google counts links as votes, counts them up assigning greater weight on votes from more important sites, e.g. the BBC (PR9) and then gives each site a score from 1 to 10.
This is what Google says about PageRank:
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.
There’s a strong opinion in the SEO world that people focus too much on their PageRank and some think it should be removed all together. The latest version of the Google toolbar shrunk the metre, maybe on the way to removing it all together.