Google is updating PageRanks

It looks like another round of Google PageRank updates is underway, as I am starting to get scores on some of the new blogs I have created over the last couple of months.

For those unfamiliar with Google PageRank, here’s a quick rundown.

There are very few measures out there that clearly tell a blogger what the Google gods are thinking about their website. One of the best ones is Google PageRank - a score from one to ten that is assigned by Google to every page that it indexes. In really simple terms a blog’s page rank is determined by the number of quality external links it has referring to it on the internet.

The easiest way to figure a web page’s page rank is to download the google pagerank plug-in if you’re using Firefox or go to a site like PageRank Checker.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of PageRank that gets into all the nitty gritty.

Like in anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO) though, it’s important that you don’t obsess too much about any single factor. Good SEO and a successful blog overall is a culmination of doing a whole bunch of things well, so don’t read too much into a blog’s PageRank. For example, Perez Hilton only has a PageRank of 7 out of 10 and he gets millions of visitors everyday.

I use PageRank as a relative measure of blog health that gives me a report every few months. Do I obsess about it? No. But if over a year I see the PageRank of a particular blog continue to fall, it’s probably a good indicator that I need to re-think what I’m doing.