How To Monitor Whether Your Toolbar PageRank Will Change In The Next Update

March 12th, 20073 Comments

I think we all know by now that Toolbar PageRank isn’t nearly as important as we’ve all made it out to be. Yet we remain captivated and controlled by it.

Many people wonder whether their linkbuilding efforts are paying off, and hate waiting the 3-4 months that Google makes us wait between Toolbar PR updates. What I’ve started doing is monitoring PageRank on a weekly basis across a variety of datacenters and here is what I have to report (I’m not guaranteeing anything, just giving you my hunch):

You can’t predict whether your PageRank is going to go up or down, but you can predict whether it is going to change in the next update.

That might not sound good enough, but if you combine two bits of knowledge 1) that you’ve been working hard at linkbuilding and 2) that your Google PR is going to change, then you can reasonably infer that 3) your PR is going to change upward, normally by 1 point.

So how do you do this? One tool that I use is LivePR. This gives you a somewhat random picture of your PageRank across a variety of datacenters. Take any given site and submit it to the LivePR tool 1-3 times. If you come across multiple instances of datacenters reporting a PR of 0, then I’ve found that it’s reasonable to infer that your PageRank will change in the next update.

I’ve found this methodology to be consistent and at least on all the site that I monitor, I’ve not gotten any false positives. Most of my sites return the same pagerank across all datacenters. This means that their pagerank will remain the same. A few (normally correlating with the sites I’ve either neglected -> going down or the ones I’ve been actively building links for -> going up) show PR 0 on a handful of datacenters (though not the majority).

Again, this could all be a coincidence, but I’ve been using it as my primary method for figuring out which linkbuilding methods work and which don’t because it gives closer to real-time indicators than the toolbar itself. It also warns me to sites that are losing PageRank because of neglect, giving me a small window of opportunity to tunnel in and fix things.

Related Articles:

• August 2007 PageRank Update - Full Blown on August 10
• April 2007 Google PageRank Update
• PageRank Update - January 10 2007
• Possible Effects of the New Google PageRank
• Suing Google over PageRank

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