Backlinking

website rank toolbar

How To Check Page Rank – And How It Affects Your Website

Page Rank

Page Rank is a useful indicator of how well respected a website is by Google. Wikipedia’s page rank for instance is incredible. But one day, a long long time ago, even Wikipedia started with a PR of zero. Don’t worry so much about getting links from websites with immense page rank.

For one, they probably won’t want to link to you just when you’re getting started. And for another, your enthusiasm could take a big dent from the higher rate of rejections. Start with small acorns to grow that big oak of yours. If you do want to find websites with a nice PR ranking, then read on.

We’ll cover just one of the simplest ways to check a website’s pagerank, although there are a number of ways to do this. First off, I personally recommend using the Firefox browser – it’s just nicer than Internet Explorer, and you have access to thousands of addons and plugins to enhance your work or leisure browsing.

Search for, download and install the ‘Google toolbar’. One of the cool features is the indicator for Page Rank in your toolbar, I use it all the time in Firefox. Simply visit a website, and you see a small bar in green if the site has any page rank. Hold your mouse cursor over it, and you’ll see the score from zero to ten. Easy. If you can’t see the indicator for Page Rank in your toolbar, right-click your Google Toolbar, click Google Toolbar Options, click Tools, then select the box for Page Rank and Save.

Armed with this toolbar addon, you can immediately check the page rank of whichever blogs or websites you’ve found that are most related to your business. As I said, don’t just disregard the smaller websites! Every website starts from zero, and a backlink you obtain today on a PR0 website, could turn into a link from a PR4 or 5 website as that site grows.

There are many things to take into account when building backlinks, and pagerank is just one of them. Sure, it’s a great indicator of how well respected a website is by Google. Also, think of relevancy. If a website has no relation to your own website content, then there is no point in gunning for a link from them, even if you see they have a high Page Rank. So apply a little common sense.

1. Download Firefox & install
2. Download Google Toolbar & install
3. Search for web pages or blogs relevant to your niche
4. Look in your toolbar – check the Page Rank score
5. If you like it, go for a backlink!