Get your Google PageRank

Each blog or Web site is ranked by Google, which gives each site a PageRank from 0 to 10. Jeff Beard, publisher of the excellent LAWTECH GURU BLOG explains in a recent post how to find out your rank (assuming you are not using a plugin on your browser) and goes on to share his views on the importance of a high rank.

Jeff suggests GoogleRankings.com and Google PageRank Calculator, both unaffiliated with Google, to get your PageRank. He likes GoogleRankings.com because it also has a feature to return the Page Rank relative to various keywords. That way you can do a few searches to determine where your site is performing, and where it might need a boost.

Here’s some highlights from Jeff’s post.

• 10’s are the massively popular sites like Google and Yahoo!. Even usatoday.com ranks a ‘9’, while nytimes.com and cnn.com only rank an ‘8’. So I’m pretty darn satisfied with a ‘6’. Some of the most popular blawgs seem to rank between 5 and 7 (although I only ran the query for a half dozen of them, so it’s not statistically significant). Precious few got a 7, such as Bag and Baggage. Most of the well-known blawgs are at 5 or 6.
• Sites that update content regularly, and that are more heavily linked to (inbound links) from other sites generally receive a higher Page Rank.
• PageRank scores, by themselves, probably won’t get you new business. But what they may get you, in the right context, is increased visibility in Google search results.
• If you want your blog or web site to be found for various keyword or phrase searches, it’s helpful to know where you’re starting from, and which words you need to add to your content on a regular basis. To get a bigger boost, you’ll want those pages to be linked to by other high-ranking sites, as that will help to elevate your ranking, and potentially, your online visibility.

Jeff makes a critical point that you can still be found online even if people do not find you on Google. Other blogs talking about you is huge.

…[D]on’t get caught in the trap that you must be found on Google or other major search engines to be found online. Yes, it’s very important, but it’s not the whole enchilada. Again, I’ll use this blog as an example. According to GoogleRankings.com, this site currently ranks as 29 to the keyword search for ‘legal technology’ using lawtechguru.com as the URL pattern. That gets knocked down to 49 when using www.lawtechguru.com as the URL pattern. Which means that I’m not on the first two pages of Google results for legal technology. But you know what? Thanks to the collegiality of my fellow blawgers, I’m linked on many of their blogrolls and vice versa. Which means that when they get found via search engines and their sites are read, some of those readers will invariably stumble onto my blog — it’s how the blogosphere works.

Thanks Jeff. Good stuff.