October 23, 2007

An Easy Way To Check And Monitor Your PageRank™

I was doing a little surfing over the weekend and nearly got attacked by a shark! It looked to be a great white, and by my estimation, it was around 5 meters (17 feet) in length. Yikes!

Okay, so that's not really entirely true. Now, I was indeed surfing...but there was no shark. In fact, there wasn't any water, either. Yes, you guessed it! I was surfing the Internet, not the mighty ocean waves.

Anyway, while I was surfing I came across a pretty neat site called SmartPageRank, which allows you to very quickly check your Google PageRank™. It also gives you some other useful information about your blog or website as well.


SmartPageRank is really simple to use. When you run a domain name through the PageRank analysis tool, it'll give you the following (and very useful) information about your site:

PageRank Analysis

This section gives you your actual Google PageRank. It also gives you the option to get PageRank updates via email, so whenever your PageRank changes, you'll know about it right away.


As you can see, since Google hasn't done their PageRank update in a long time, I'm still sitting at a big, fat goose egg! I used to have a Google PageRank of 3, but when I moved this blog over to the aaroncook.com domain name back in April, I of course lost that PageRank.

Age Of Domain

The second section tells you when and how long ago a domain name was registered - right down to the number of days.


I do notice that this only provides the date information on a domain based on its current registrant. For example, the aaroncook.com domain name had actually been online for many years before I was finally able to snag it.

Site Traffic

The third section gives you a live look your site traffic according to Alexa. This section provides you with an Alexa Traffic History Graph and also links that traffic graph right to the Alexa page for your site. Pretty cool.


Web Directories

The fourth section simply lets you know whether or not your website is listed in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory. So far, every blog I checked on wasn't listed in either of them, with the exceptions being Darren Rowse of Problogger and Matt Cutts.


Btw, what's up with Matt's site traffic? Yikes, talk about a steady decline. I guess he's been too busy lately working at Google as head of their Webspam team and traveling around the country giving talks on white hat SEO to keep up with his blog like he used to.

Backlinks

The backlinks section is a really neat and useful section. Basically, it lists the total number of webpages that link to your domain.


And SmartPageRank's new Backlinks Analyzer is really cool. It lists all the sites and individual webpages that link to you, along with their PageRank. To see it in action, you can get a live look at the Backlinks Analyzer for my blog right here.

Indexed Pages

The indexed pages section gives you a look at the current number of pages of your website that are indexed in the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and AllTheWeb.


You'll notice that the totals will vary greatly from search engine to search engine. This is because the figures shown represent the number of links that are crawled by each search engine (which varies because of the difference in size of their databases).


Website Value

This section gives you a calculation of the estimated monetary value of a website.


As stated by SmartPageRank, "This value is represents the approximate value of the website entered. Of course, this value does NOT include the worth of the company behind the website but rather is an estimated value of the website itself. Some of these valuation factors include: PageRank, traffic, backlinks, age of the domain, directory listings, and other items not shown in the summary above."

I think it's more for fun than anything else. So I decided to have a little fun with it and run some of my favorite blogs through the PageRank analyzer just to see where we all landed. Here are the results, listed in alphabetical order:

Aaron Cook Dot Com: $1,604
Brown Thoughts: $542
Bush Mackel: $1,929 (jerk) :P
Five 4 All: $407
MeAndMyDrum: $1,521
Ordinary Folk: $1,032
Revellian: $1,405

Anyway, I really like the SmartPageRank site and will continue to monitor my blog's PR, backlinks and indexed pages with it.

UPDATE: (Oct. 26th) Google just completed their PageRank update and I'm happy to report that Aaron Cook Dot Com™ has moved up to a PR of 4. Happy times!

20 comments:

  1. Super post Aaron. As always, I enjoyed reading. :D

    Take care,
    Oscar

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  2. I demand a recount, Bush!! LOL

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  3. @Oscar: Thanks buddy! You know I always like hearing such things! :)

    @Mark: Yeah, tell me about it! Guess he finally decided to get his act together after winning the Link Love Loser Award a few weeks back.

    Perhaps we lambasted him enough that it lit a much-needed fire under his blogging butt! LOL. :P

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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  4. I am glad I have a 301 redirect in place so my site doesn't have the WWW prefix!

    I don't know what the deal is with DMOZ. I have submitted my blog to them several times and they assured me I was listed.

    The free version of Yahoo directory listings isn't worth bothering with. One day maybe I'll actually spend some money for something.

    To date, I have never spent a single penny on anything except for paying BlueHost.

    I lost my pagerank when I moved from blogspot too! I could have kept it if I had known how to write a 301 redirect back then!

    At least this one gives a much more accurate site worth than that other popular widget that says my blog is worth over $300,000...LOL!!!!!

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  5. Aaron,
    As always you come through with some cool Sh#%. I checked my stats, not good. I will have to start improving.

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  6. @Bobby: Yeah, I never even tried to list with DMOZ. As for the Yahoo! Directory, I wasn't aware that there was a free way in anymore. There's a nonrefundable $299 submission fee, then it's $299 yearly to stay listed. Both go up to $699 if a site has "adult" content or services on it. As far as a blog goes, that's just a waste of money.

    I haven't spent any money on my blog either...not one red cent. :) And I'm still on Blogger because I bet a friend that I could generate $5,000 per month via a free blogging platform. He said it was impossible. Ha, I'm almost 1/5 of the way there! And I'm not one to lose a bet! :)

    Once I reach that mark then I may move to this blog to WordPress. It's a much better platform anyway.

    Shine on,
    Aaron

    PS: Perhaps that widget "really" tells what your blog will be worth sometime in the future...Because I know that if you keep things up like you're doing it'll one day be worth that and MORE!!! :)

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  7. @Andrew. Thanks buddy! Yeah, checking stats on a regular basis with tools like this is a good way to stay on top of things. I now that sometimes I think I'm doing better than I am, and when I get the "real data" I realize that it's time to make a few adjustments and step things up a bit.

    Btw Andrew, you're actually doing pretty good for only being on that domain for just under three months. :)

    Anyway, here's to constantly improving! :)

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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  8. I've been using SmartPageRank for quite a while now. It's a great site. Check out the value of the comic site. It's a very close second to Bush's site ;P

    Of course we could use the blog values from Dane Carlson's little value calculator, then I'll PWN you all :D

    It's still using an old estimate of $608,574.12. If it ever grabs the correct technorati numbers again it should be somewhere around 700k. I'm totally going to sell..hehe.

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  9. @Mike: Cool! Then that means you're a jerk, too! :P

    Yeah, Dane's calculator is a little out there with those astronomical dollar figures. But of course, that's for a reason...He made so that people would want to use it and link back to his site (which I'm featured on every now and again, btw). And boy did it work. One of the best cases of linkbait on the Internet ever!

    And when a post of mine is featured there I always get a good little burst of traffic. :) So yay for crazy blog value calculators! :)

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  10. I've not heard of this one before. Looks like I found a new tool to use on a regular basis. Good find Aaron! :D

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  11. I've not heard of this one before. Looks like I found a cool new tool to use on a regular basis. Good find there Aaron! :D

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  12. Thanks Tom! Yeah, I'll be using it regularly as well. And like Mike said, he's been using the site for some time now and really likes it.

    If he likes something, then I know for sure it has value. :)

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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  13. Thanks for the heads up on this site. It's a neat little tool although the backlink section could use a bit of work I think. All in all,it's definitely worth a look.

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  14. @AntiBarbie: You're welcome. I've been using it a lot lately to check on a lot of different sites. It works extremely well.

    Anyway, thanks for dropping by. Hope you're having an awesome weekend! :P

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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  15. Great information! Congratulations on the PR! Stop by my blog anytime, you're always welcome!

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  16. Thanks Dave! Will do! :)

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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  17. GWA HA HA! I'm the man!

    You know Aaron, it looks you made this post a hair before the final PR updates dropped. Checking things again, our sites' values have gone way up!

    I still can't believe I've edged e'ryone out in this little competition!

    THE DAY IS MINE!

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  18. +1

    That's a really cool site btw. I had a good PR site that I found the other day (besides iweb) but I forgot the URL and can't find it.

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  19. @Bush: Yeah, for now you're the man. But just for now. So enjoy it while it lasts 'cause it won't last long! LOL. :P

    Yeah, I see that those values have jumped quite a bit. Cool. Too bad they don't really mean anything. Shucks.

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  20. +1 @Bush: (hee hee)

    Yeah, I really like SmartPagerank a lot. I'm quite glad I came across it. I've been using it quite frequently in the recent days and weeks.

    Shine on,
    Aaron

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Shine on,
Aaron