• Lesson Index:
• Overview
• Basic
• Google Toolbar and PR
• Alt and Title
• Funny Names
• Google Dance
• Googlebot
• Google Sandbox
• Trust Rank
• AdSense
• Google Ads
• Google Search
• AdSense for Content
• Earning Reports
• Channels
• Policies
• Filter Ads
• Promotion
• Keyword Optimization
• Information Rich Pages
• Link Exchanges
• No Tricks
• No Spam
• Web Forums
• Web Directories
• Other Ways
• Checking Up

Using Google Toolbar to Determine a Site's Page Rank

Page Rank (or PR) is Google's technology for determining the importance of a site. It ranges from 0 to 10 -- 10 being most important. With all other things being equal, the higher a site's Page Rank, the higher it is listed in Google search results. Loosely speaking, the Page Rank is a site's popularity. One of the factors that affects your site's Page Rank is how many other sites are linking to your site and the Page Rank of those sites. Obviously, the more incoming links, the better the ranking. And the PR effect will be greater if you are linked to by high PR sites.

Now that you know what Page Rank (or PR) is, how do we determine a site's Page Rank? Here is one easy way ...

1. If you have not already done so, download and install the Google's toolbar in either your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser.

To download the toolbar for the IE browser, go here.
To download the toolbar for the Firefox browser, go here.

2. Here are a list of the Google Toolbar Features. But the one that we are interested in is the Page Rank Display. Turn that feature on by clicking Options in the Google Toolbar. If it prompts you with a dialog that says "You are about to enable a feature which has privacy implications.", click OK. Then click Okay to the Toolbar Options dialog.

3. Browse to a site and the Page Rank is displayed as a green bar. Pause your cursor over the PageRank display and the tooltip will indicated its ranking. If you don't see any green portion in the PageRank bar that means that it has Page Rank of zero.

The page rank shown on the toolbar is the ranking of a page (and not for a site). So each individual page of a site can have different page ranks. When people loosely say that a page rank of a site is such and such, they are usually referring to the page rank of the home page of the site.

There is a difference between the 0 to 10 PR shown on the toolbar (which is what most people refer to when the mention PR) versus the actually real page rank that the Google engine uses to determine search result. Many people believe that the 0 to 10 PR is logarithmic scale breakdown of the actual page rank value as mentioned here.

Learn about Alt and Title tags in the next lesson.