Page Ranks - What are they and what is my website ranked?

November 25, 2008 by Mark
Filed under: Tactic

In my quest to find the best backlink tactics I’ve discovered it’s no secret that backlinks from a page that has a high Page Rank is very valuable.

There is 3 main Page Ranks to review:

Google Page Rank
Alexa Rank
Compete Rank

Of course with Google having 70.5% of the search engine market share as of Octobeer 2008 it is going to be the most important to have.

A quick search will show there are many techniques to work out what you rankings your site and pages are. I’d like to share with you one that I find very useful.

Using the FireFox add-in - StatusSearch as you browse the Internet a footer toolbar on FireFox will show you the Rankings for the page you are on :

There are also some great options to view backlinks - for the current page or the whole domain :

After choosing this option, FireFox will open 3 browser windows showing the links: URL for google, yahoo and the Microsoft live search engines.

As you can see from the many other menu options there are many more handy features with this FireFox Plug-in.

Google Page Ranks

There is some detailed information on how Google calculates Page Rank but in summary - 10 is for the most popular pages and 0 for none indexed pages. Google keeps crawling the net and updating this rank and the pages with the highest rank appear highest in the search results.

Google frowns upon people selling backlinks on high Page Rank pages and will devalue sites they catch doing this.

Alexa Rank

The Alexa Rank or Alexa Traffic Rank comes from people with the Alexa toolbar browsing to your site. Alexa describe it as “The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).”

In summary - the higher the number, then supposedly the higher the number of users have hit the site.

Some think the Alexa toolbar is spyware or trackware. I’ve seen sites that have a low Google Rank

Compete Rank

The Compete Rank is very similar to the Alexa Rank but they call it a Trust Scores. They say that they track the top 1 million sites in the US - based on US visitors/month. It makes counts based on Unique visitors based on over 2 millions Compete users (have installed the Compete toolbar). The use their statistics in the media to report on which websites are more popular on a month by month basis. The higher the number the better.

Round Up of the Three Ranks

Alexia and Compete tracks visitors by the use of a browser plug-in on a small percentage of Internet users, and Google calculates Page Rank based on a very complex calculation using backlinks and the backlink page ranks as key performance indicators.

After learning all this - I don’t think I’ll take any real notice of Compete or Alexia ranks, but focus on the Google Page Rank and see how if affects the Compete of Alexia ranks.

One thing is known is for sure - If you have a high Google Page Rank then you are very attractive to other sites to have backlinks inserted on your site.

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