A PageRank (PR) is one of the main ways to check a website’s “ranking” amongst its peers. Am I talking Chinese here? “PageRank” is Google’s rating (between PR0 and PR10 on an logarythmic scale) of ‘how valuable’ your site is to the web community (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 234,000 books and 1,234,000 articles written on the subject).
The higher a PageRank, the better, and the higher up your site will feature on a Google search. (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 34,000 books and 2,234,000 articles written on THAT subject)…
While weeding through 200 nonprofit blogs this weekend, I turved the PageRank of each:
Pagerank distribution of the nonprofit blogs
As 200 blogs are a fair representation of the “nonprofit blog market”, this gives you the opportunity to rate your website amongst your peers… You don’t know your PageRank? Use this tool…
Some thoughts are in order here:
- If your blog rates PR0 then either it must be new (Google sometimes takes 2-3 months to rate a new site), changed its domain recently, or there is something really wrong.
- As the scale is logarythmic, the step from PR5 to PR6 is much bigger than from a PR2 to PR3…
- Most of the higher ranked sites (PR7-PR8) are the blogs of large humanitarian organisations.
- In my experience, if you create a blog, post some stuff, and leave it hanging around, the least you should get, is a PR2.
Post a few blogs per month, and a PR3 will be your rating.
Network a bit with your blogging community, cross link to other blogs (and back), post a few updates per week, and Google will award you a PR4. Anything higher up requires more serious work. I will write about the basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization in a future post). - It takes a long time, sometimes 6 to 12 months before a blog gets a PR up to its true value… Google scans all sites several times per day, and keeps track of your blogs “behaviour”. It builds up the “trust” in your site slowly.
So don’t get discouraged if you are at the lower end of the table. BlogTips, for instance, has a PR3, but it has only been around for three months. I will see it climb slowly over the coming months.
So, how did you score?
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
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Here’s an article helping to explain PageRank if anyone is interested in reading more into it.