Cheezhead

Last month, I could probably count the number of people commenting on their Google PageRank with both hands. If you don’t know, PR is Google’s public rating of a particular page, using a scale of 0-10. The higher the better. Click here to see your own site’s PR, if you don’t already have Google’s toolbar.

Though it is fun to discuss and see how your site evolves in Google’s eyes in this manner, PR should be looked at as a general guide, meant more for entertainment purposes than gospel. PR won’t guarantee you better rankings and, frankly, it’s updated way too irregularly to be a true compass by which anyone should steer their boat. Besides, Google’s internal PR of your site most likely isn’t the same as the public one. If it were, both Yahoo! and MSN would probably both be PR 10s.

Is there something better? Yes.

A better measurement of what Google thinks of your site is how frequently they index it. To get an idea of how your own site is doing:

1. Go to Google.
2. Type in info:yoursite.com and click Search
3. This will take you to the information Google has on this particular page. Click on “Google’s cache.”
4. This will take you to this page’s snapshot. At the top, you’ll see a date, which is when Google last visited this page.

If it’s a recent date, say within the last 7-10 days, that’s good (as long as it remains recent, of course). If your site hasn’t been visited by Google’s spiders in awhile, say over a month, that’s most likely a sign that Google doesn’t think too highly of you. The remedy, of course, is improved link popularity and high-grade, ongoing content generation.

In short, PR is more for fun than something to lose sleep over, while the frequency by which Google visits your site is a better indication of how much they like you.