Google's PageRank

The online strategy for this blog is coming along nicely, and I'll tell you more about it later. I just wanted to give you a few link that might be helpful when working on optimising your website and attract more users.

Pagerank

One of the many calculations behind your ranking on Google, is the Google Pagerank. The pagerank is a number from 0 and up indicating the relevance of your site compared to others. If you've installed the Google Toolbar, the pagerank will be shown for each site you visit (unless you disabled the feature - or spyware as some might consider it) with a number between 0 and 10 (indicating a pagerank of 100,000,000,000+ or something). This blog is 'only' a three (pagerank between 10,000 and 100,000), but hopefully that'll change with time when I start putting more content in, and people start noticing the site.

Google Cheat Sheet

Back to the links i promised. The first link is to a Google cheat sheet with loads of hints on how to use Google's products, and where to find various things. One of the things on the cheat sheet is the Google PageRank formula. From what I gather, it's been dug out of one of the original research papers on the Google system. The formula by it self makes no sense, but with a bit more explanation you should be able to see the point. Apparently your pagerank is the pagerank divided by the number of external links of all the sites that link to you. The value is calculated for each site, then added to a grand total and multiplied with 0,85 (a number Google researchers is said to have found by testing all values between 0 and 1, to get the most appropriate result) I haven't dived deeply into the math of it all, but it seems that it would be helpful to have links to your site on other sites with a good pagerank (or better than yours anyway) besides just having loads of links to your site.

Visual PageRank View

The only problem with the Google Toolbar is, that it's quite a hassle to browse through all the sites you link to and those they link to, to see the pagerank. Enter iWebtools Visual PageRank tool. This will show you a small bar on each of the link on your site, indicating the page rank of each page that you link too! :) It can't be easier then that.

The Hard Part

The problem with the pagerank formula, is that it's fairly difficult to affect the result. You can't just set up an army of websites that link to your site, because they would most likely have a pagerank of 0, and never get a better one. You have to 'earn' your links, by supplying interesting products or information that people think are work linking to.