Subscribe Yippee! On October 20, I checked the Google PageRank of my blog and it was 4 out of 10, up from 0 out of 10. Naturally, the zero was because my blog is only, what, 3 months old. 
Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym “SEO,” PageRank measures how important Google considers a site to be. Google calculates a site’s “importance” by determining how many other sites link to that particular site. There are two types of PageRank: “actual PageRank” and “toolbar PageRank.” Only Google knows a site’s “actual PageRank”; that’s the PageRank used as a factor in search results. The toolbar PageRank is the PageRank that is visible in the Google Toolbar, and it is a good indicator of how high your actual PageRank is compared to other sites.
In order for you to understand what toolbar PageRank is, imagine that the web is split into ten equal slices (well, eleven, if you count zero), ordered from lowest actual PageRank to highest actual PageRank. The “slice” that you end up in is your toolbar PageRank. So that means I’m in the fourth-lowest (or sixth-highest) slice of websites. So I’m about in the middle of the Web in terms of importance. Not bad, in my opinion. 
Michael Kreidler responded on 25 Oct 2005 at 1:55 pm #
How did you get this info? Is it accessible via the google toolbar only? I have been avoiding getting google toolbar because I heard it added the Google adsense to all websites.
Anyways, thanks for the post and I would appreciate more info.
Michael Kreidler
http://www.discipleswithmicrophones.org
http://dwmblog.blogspot.com
John Lamansky responded on 25 Oct 2005 at 2:16 pm #
As far as I know, the Google Toolbar doesn’t add AdSense to every site you visit… AdSense only appears on sites that want to obtain the advertising revenue provided by the service. You can use the Google Toolbar, but I use the SearchStatus extension (available at http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/) for Mozilla Firefox, which provides Google PageRank as well as Alexa rank.
Matthew Blevins responded on 02 Mar 2006 at 9:49 am #
John - you’re correct in saying that the Google Toolbar does NOT add Google’s Adsense to your site or sites that you’re visiting - one must sign up to display Adsense on his or her site. There is an application and review process to ensure that Google ads aren’t shown on sites that don’t abide by their TOS. Michael - I’ve been using the toolbar for years as I develop the web site for my company, a staffing agency, and find it very useful for research and quick searching. A GREAT extension for Firefox is the “Aggregate Yahoo! and Google” tool, which combines results from Yahoo! Search and Google in one interface (Google’s) - available here.