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Next: Alexa Traffic Rank Google Toolbar PageRankThe Google toolbar is probably the most used, at least amongst SEO experts and website developers because it provides a representation of the site's PageRank as a little green bar. The PageRank figure and the need to garner inbound-links has become an addiction for many website owners. The PageRank value effects how links are created on the Web. It is a bit like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, by observing the web Google has disturbed how it functions. Website owners are reluctant to exchange links with low PageRank sites and high PageRank sites can charge hundreds of dollars for a link. More seasoned SEO experts will point to the many sites in the search engine results that achieve high rankings despite low toolbar PageRanks. They say that many other factors, both off-page and on-page have an effect on Google rankings. If you have read the section on PageRank you will know that the values Google calculates for pages using its famous formula range from 0.15 to some very large values. The 0.15 page ranks are discounted as they are orphan pages and unreachable except by the Google robot. This is one reason why it is vital to get at least one inbound-link from a site already in the Google index rather than spending lots of time entering home pages through the submission page. The remaining page ranks are normalized onto a logarithmic scale using a base somewhere between 6 and 8. If we use base 8 we get the following figures:-
Another way of looking at this if you are into link exchanges is that a PR2 inbound-link is roughly worth 8 times a PR1 link. Of course you have to divide this by the number of outbound-links on the page. So a PR2 page with 8 outbound-links it worth the same as a PR1 page with a single link to your site. All these figures are based on observations as Google doesn't publish the exact details of how the toolbar works, but they should give you a good idea. If, after the monthly calculations and assuming the above scale, Google gives our site a real page rank of 59.67 what the toolbar will report is a (fairly high ranking) PR1 site. Some important points:
It is clear that the toolbar value is an approximation to the real PageRank value and may not get updated promptly, thus the reported toobar PageRank may differ markedly from the real PageRank. During the summer of 2004 Google went almost three months without updating the toolbar PageRank, perhaps in an effort to treat the toolbar junkies. Google carried on calculating real PageRanks but the toolbar would still show either a zero PageRank for new pages or the old figure. This would account for some of the high ranking sites that had low or zero PageRank. The toolbar can sometimes make guesses. You may see a PageRank for pages that have only just been published and that are not yet in the index. It seems to be showing the PageRank of the next page up in the site hierachy less 1, if this page doesn't have a PageRank the toobar continues the process subtracting 1 for each step up the hierarchy. The Google toolbar also lets you perform functions such as finding the number of backlinks (inbound-links) to a website. Be careful, the results exclude all the backlinks with a PageRank less than 4. Yahoo! and the new MSN search provide a more accurate report of inbound-links to the site. Google Toolbar Version 3[Updated 21st March 2005] Google has launched version 3 of its toolbar (currently in Beta) and launched itself into more controversy. The new toolbar provides three new important features:
It is this last feature that has some web site owners fuming as they claim Google is tampering with their intellectual property. Currently the feature has to be user enabled so it seems like another storm in a teacup. Googlebar[Updated 24th March 2005] Googlebar provides Mozilla with Google toolbar to support the Netscape 7, Mozilla, and Firefox web browsers. The current release offers the basic search functionality of the toolbar, giving easy access to almost all of Google's specialty searches
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