Sunday, April 02, 2006

A Live Look at Your Google PageRank

In the eternal quest for getting one’s website where more and more eyes can see it, there’s one number that a large part of the world looks to for the best idea of where they lie - the Google PageRank. According to Google, this number upholds 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.”

Fortunately, there are several sites out there that can help you look up your PageRank quickly. Unfortunately, this can vary from site to site, depending on their records. So, what’s a developer to do? Enter this handy tool from Raketforskning.com - a Live PageRank tool to query a large number (78) of the sites for you, all at once.

Simply enter the location of your site and click on “Get Live PR” - it’s that easy. Once the submit is made, the scripts heads out, via Ajax connections, to grab the data from the various sources. It’s displayed in a list below as the results arrive. The data is displayed with the IP it came from, a bar that shows the rank visually, and a rating out of ten.

For those Firefox users out there, there’s also an extension for viewing the PageRank of whatever site you’re on.