It seems that every year I’m in this business, more and more *new* things are heaped upon those entering it TODAY. The new terms keep piling up, and I can see why some webmasters have said that they feel swamped by it all! Maybe I’m the last person who should be talking about the Google Toolbar and PageRank - because I’m far from an expert. BUT… maybe I can lay out the basics…

First of all - let’s clear up PR. PR is short for PageRank.

Pagerank is a bit more tricky to explain.

Let’s just think about search engines for a minute here.

If you do a search on just about anything these days - it’s not very often a search engine says, “sorry pal - couldn’t find anything on that…” The world and his wife has found that search engines are capable of sending large numbers of people to websites - and they ALL want a piece of the action. The consequence of this has been that the SEs are literally FLOODED with thousands upon thousands of pages - no - millions of pages.

And the number keeps growing!

Obviously, every single page that the search engine finds after we do a search can’t be shown at once. Instead, the pages are ‘ranked’ - they’re given a sequence. The rankings start at 1) and running all the way down until the very last page has been shown. And that’s not such a bad thing. I mean just because a page mentions the word “tree”, it doesn’t mean that the page is relevant to that word. That word might be only one of thousands mentioned on that webpage. Other webpages would be more relevant to what the surfer (site visitor) had searched on - and ‘deserve’ to be placed above that page in the search engine rankings.

So search engines have to take the phrase you gave them and then put the thousands of pages it finds on that subject in ORDER. Quite a job!

So what’s all this got to do with PAGERANK???

PageRank is something that Google uses to help decide how far up that list of sites found each page should appear.

How does pagerank work?

Think of PageRank as being a way to measure how ‘important’ your page is to surfers.

Here’s the three main stages of PageRank:

1) If a RELEVANT webpage links to you - your PageRank increases. Relevant links mean the page linking to you actually have something to do with what your site has to offer and talk about.

2) The more PageRank the page linking to you already has - the more your PageRank increases.

3) The LESS sites that the webpage linking to you chooses to link to - the more PageRank you get.

There’s an in-depth explanation over here:

http://www.webran...h/pagerank/index.php

PageRank is a score from 0 to 10. With 10 being the best. Although it’s possible to get a good search engine listing without ANY PageRank - it is something that’s worth learning about and considering. It sounds worse than it really is, and anyone can work on increasing their PageRank.

So what about this Toolbar thing?

Google invented a free bit of software to give away on their website. When you install this software, it adds some new buttons into Internet explorer.

The main features of the toolbar are:

1) A search box - just like you’ll get on Google.com - to save you going to google each time you want to make a search. Type a phrase in here, and Google will be searched for that phrase.

2) ‘Search the Web’ takes you to Google.

3) PageRank - this is the important bit to us! This part of the toolbar takes the form of a green ‘energy bar’ which shows the score (PageRank) of a page. If you hold the mouse pointer still over this bar it will give you the score. Whichever webpage your browser is on, you can see the score it has in this bar. 3/10 means a pageRank of three out of a possible 10.

The Google Toolbar is available here:
http://toolbar.google.com/

It is free and safe… Install it and go to some competitor websites - go to your websites. See what pageRank they have.