Google Toolbar Pagerank - carefully explained and what you can do with it - written by top SEO experts

Google Toolbar displays a number of icons representing each feature offered.

Google Pull Down Menu: Click the "Google" logo on the left side of the Google Toolbar to display a menu of handy links, including pointers to toolbar options, other Google services, and help.


Google says: Toolbar PageRank is for entertainment purposes only


We just got this from a google rep. This is not helpful to me in trying to determine WHY one of our clients sites went from a Page Rank of 6 to 0. I could take it for what it's worth, and say "Oh, they launched a new site in October, therefore the pagerank just got set to zero (even though it was a 6, at the same domain name) because it's new, and I can just ignore it. Well, the thing is, the rankings went down as well. Admittedly the site has huge issues with indexability due to long dynamic url params. But, I this makes it so much harder to figure out the main culprit in the rapidly decreasing rankings. :The decrease coincides with the PR becoming 0, but also with a new version f the site getting launched.

"The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for
entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to
access this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequently
because is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the
Google Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR of
zero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn't been
updated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the Google
Toolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results so
there is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If a
site is showing up in the search results, it doesn't not have a real PR
of zero, the Toolbar is just out of date"


Google PageRank is the system that Google uses to decide where your webpage is ranked on its search pages. Whether your website is ranked on the first page of chosen keywords for searches or the last page, there is a reason. Google PageRank is the system that Google uses to decide what your rank is.

The main idea is that every time someone links to your website, it is a vote for your website and it will slightly affect your Google rank. However, the worth of each particular link-vote depends on the website that is linking to you.

Websites with a high PageRank of their own (e.g. ones on the first page of a popular keyword search on Google) will usually help increase your PageRank dramatically when they link to you. On the other hand, websites that are not very popular will not have links that are worth very much.

Also, you get higher Page Rank if the links that point to your website are relevant to its content. If the links are irrelevant, they are not worth as much and so your PageRank is less.

Another factor would be the amount of links on the page that links to your website. Getting a link on a website with a high page rank is not always that useful if there are a thousand other links on the same page and they are all unrelated.

The only other main factor that Google analyses when deciding your search engine position would be the age of your website and the websites that link to you. However, that is not something you can usually control unless you buy an old domain second-hand.

Is there a way to check your Google PageRank right now?

Of course there is. You can either go here: Guests cannot see links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see links. type in your web address and see how your PageRank is from 1-10 (with 3 being decent, 4 being good and ten being only a handful of websites)

Alternatively, you can download the Google toolbar which will reveal the PageRank of any website that you browse. You can get it at Guests cannot see links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see links.

So the way to make this higher is to gain more good-quality, high-relevance, incoming links?

That must be it. That is all there is to getting a better Google rank, to improving your website's popularity and to making money online.

Of course, you may not know it but there are plenty of ways that you can increase your number of incoming links fairly quickly.

When talking about search engine optimization, it is almost impossible not to stumble upon the phrase: Google page rank. This term is without doubt very important to webmasters who want to obtain a good ranking and a lot of traffic, but why? Well, by simply understanding how the mathematical formula at the heart of the PageRank (PR) is calculated, any webmaster can influence its website's Google listing.

Google page rank is one of the methods this search engine has of evaluating the relevance of a web page. The toolbar PR consists of a number between 0-10 which can be easily seen if you have the Google toolbar installed. If you don't have this toolbar, then visiting quickpagerank.com will allow you to easily check page rank. This website is very easy to use and supplies much more information than the Google toolbar. By simply typing the URL of your site and clicking the "submit" button, you will be able to view your Google page rank, Alexa rank, whether you are listed in Dmoz or not, backlinks showing in major search engines and results coming from AltaVista and the entire web.

PR is short for the Google page rank which is calculated by Google and can range from 0.15 to billions. It represents a "vote" of appreciation or support for a certain website from all the rest existing on the web. It therefore can be zero or a very high number given by the number of links pointing to a site from all the rest. The formula from the original Google paper looks like this: "PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))" and the symbols represent the following: A - the page for which we want to check page rank, T1...Tn - the pages which are pointing to it through links, C(A) - the number of links coming from page A and pointing to other sites and d - damping factor usually set at 0.85. As you can see the calculus is quite difficult and this is because it doesn't stop here.

It seems quite impossible to calculate how exactly Google page rank is assigned to a certain page because the PR of a page depends on the PR of all the pages pointing to it. This leads to circle calculations as the PR of those pages pointing to let's say page "A" also have to be calculated and this is done depending on other sites with their own PR. In addition, Google reevaluates websites periodically re-indexing new links and new pages, all updated and better optimized. Its job is quite difficult, but thank god it's a machine that's doing it and not a human!

So, the conclusion is that Google page rank is too difficult to analyze. Entire pages have been written on its algorithms and a lot of intelligent minds have struggled to find out the undisclosed mathematical intricacies of the PR. All we know are the simple facts that Google listings are influenced by links, among which one way links prove to be more efficient. Therefore everyone strives to optimize their websites as much as possible for keyword searches which are performed by Google spiders all the time. After doing their best, webmasters turn to check page rank.

A really interesting aspect related to Google page rank is that Google's listings don't always show the sites which have the highest PR in their top findings. This is a puzzling fact. To check page rank has become an undisputable habit for webmaster that do their best to promote their online business and obtain more traffic. Sometimes, their main purpose for optimization is to obtain a high Google page rank, but perhaps this is not the perfect approach for Google's ranking system. Of course, PR is very important, but since we don't know for sure how to obtain it, perhaps it would be wiser to do our best to improve website quality and promote them by using only the given facts. So, don't forget that popularity is the key to success! And, after investing in quality, to best analyze your efforts, you should also constantly check page rank and see how things are going from Google's point of view.


If you're a website owner and you're trying to get organic search engine traffic then you've probably heard the term "Google Pagerank". But what is Pagerank and how does a websites pagerank effect search engine rankings? In this article I'll address those questions and try to give you some insight into this often confusing topic.

What is Google pagerank? Google developed the "pagerank" system several years ago for the purpose of gauging how "important" a web page is. The higher the pagerank, the more "important" Google thinks the webpage is. Google uses this gauge as a part of its ranking algorithm.

How do I check a sites pagerank? Google offers a free toolbar that you can download and install on your machine. One of the things this toolbar does is to display the Pagerank of whatever webpage you're looking at.

Where does pagerank come from? Pagerank is all about webpages linking to other webpages. You see, every page that Google indexes has a pagerank value associated with it. Every time one page links to another page, a portion of that pagerank value "passes" to the page it links to. Higher ranking pages, pass more pagerank to the pages they link to.

What happens is, when one page links to another page, it's kind of like the page that does the linking is voting for the other page. So to get pagerank to your webpage, all you have to do is get other pages to link to it.

Pagerank is really just a mathematical calculation that determines how "important" a webpage is based on how "important" the pages that link to it are.

A crucial point here that is often misunderstood is that pagerank is passed on a page by page basis. Many webmasters assume that a sites pagerank is determined by its home page. While it's true that the homepage is often the highest ranking page within a website, it doesn't have to be. Any page on a given website could rank higher then the homepage.

The myth that the homepage will have the highest pagerank comes from the fact that many webmasters (especially old school webmasters) participated in reciprocal linking programs where they would exchange links to each others homepages. So, by default, the homepage wound up with the highest pagerank simply because it had the most links pointing to it.

So how will my pagerank affect my search engine rankings? Pagerank is simply not as powerful as it once was. There was a time when all you had to do to rank well was to get enough websites to link to you and you could dominate virtually any listing you wanted. Today, the ranking algorithm is much more complex. Many other factors are taken into account. However, pagerank does still play a reasonably important roll so getting backlinks is still a major task in the search engine optimization world. It's just that the way we go about getting those links has changed.

One final note, my recommendation is to never worry too much about Pagerank. Build your website to the best of your ability; create well written, compelling web pages and you'll get backlinks naturally. Further, take some of your better articles and submit them to a few article directories - include a resource box which links back to your site and you'll get some excellent backlinks pretty quickly. Just stay away from reciprocal linking campaigns, whatever benefit they once had is long gone.