How to Find Internal PageRank for All Pages of Your Website

by John

PageRank (PR) is a Google trademarked term that simply refers to the overall importance of a web page. PageRank plays an important part of any money making strategy in two significant ways:

The higher your PR the more leverage you will have with advertisers and other partners. Blogs or other websites with a PR of 0-2 are a dime a dozen. As your website moves from a PR of 3 to 4,5 or even higher (I currently have a website at PR5 but have never been to a 6) you will find more people wanting to talk with you about advertisement opportunities or partnerships. This is even independent of the amount of traffic you get.
The way the PageRank algorithm works (read this for a complete analysis) is that it is the quality of sites that link to you rather than the quantity of sites (although quantity plays too if they are of quality) that defines how important your own site is. If one PR5 site links to you that is much better than 5 PR1 sites. And the better ranked your site becomes the more likely it will appear in Google searches or even the all-important top three Google results. So it is important to be linked to be high PR pages.

PageRank is not just for the front page

Now the interesting thing is that when most people think of PR, and this includes advertisers that I have seen, they only seem to be thinking about the PR of the main page of the website. However, this is a big mistake. PageRank does as it’s name implies, which is to rank a page on the website. The front page is just one page. In a blog each article will be on a separate page and those pages will have separate PageRank. What you will find on any blog is that the main page will have a PR4, let’s say, some popular articles will also have a PR4, some will have 3, 2 or even 1. And many, many articles will actually have a PR0.

If someone writes an article and links to your site then what is important is what is the PR for that article page they wrote, not the PR of the main page. Of course over time the PR on that article will change, and that is the beauty of the link architecture of the web. Someone who wrote an article linking to you years ago may now be super popular and that page may rank very well in Google – and pass some of that “Google Juice” over to you.

How to find PageRank

There are many tools available to help you determine the PageRank of any page. The Google Toolbar is probably one of the most popular. There are also tools that ask you to enter a URl and it will return the PR. Just do a Google search for “how to calculate pagerank” and you will find plenty of options that both promise to provide PageRank for one page or all of the pages on your website. The problem I have found is that many of these services seem to come and go. The tool that I used last week may no longer work this week since they are hosted solutions. So I have come up with a better solution.

My easy solution to find internal PageRank

My solution involves two very solid solutions that I don’t think are going away anytime soon. Google and the SEO for Firefox extension. First, install the extension and make sure it is enabled. What this will give you is that when you do a Google search you will see some additional SEO results for each line returned from the Google search. Important: make sure you turn off this extension when you don’t care about the SEO return values. This is very easy to do by clicking on the icon in the lower right of the browser window.

Now that you have the extension running you need to do two things in Google:

In Google Preferences change the Number of Results option to display 100 results per page.
In Google Advanced Search in the Search within a site or domain box select your domain like “mydomain.com” without the quotes.

With Google set to return 100 results and the SEO for Firefox extension running after a short period of time you will have 100 of your pages with the PR for each of those pages. You can use the Ctrl-F find facility in Firefox to easily find internal pages of a certain PageRank by searching for “PR: 3″ for example.

This solution is a little bit of a path-work solution but I am confident it will be around for a long time and that you can count on it to determine internal pagerank.

What solutions do you use to calculate internal page rank?

Share and Enjoy: