I'm sure most of you know that Google now updates its toolbar viewable PageRank every few months at unspecified intervals. I would be willing to bet you also know that what you see in the toolbar is at least two months out of date. Enough articles have been written on this subject. People buy and sell links based on this out of date toolbar Page Ranking info. You may buy a link because your toolbar says the site is Page Ranking 6 and in reality, Google now sees it as a Page Ranking 3. There are no guarantees and it is a risky venture to obtain paid backlink’s.
Nevertheless, you can get a pretty good idea of how Google views you in real time monthly. Yes they do offer this info to webmaster’s regarding their own sites. You have to do a little guessing and estimating but you can in fact get a good idea of where you are at. I’m going to tell you how.
Do you have a sitemap? Do you keep it up to date with the many tools available to you? Do you submit it to your Google Sitemap Page? I hope you do since this is a very important step in getting Google to index your page. That's not the subject here but we at vBulletin Modder use the vBSEO sitemap generator to update and submit our sitemap twice a day. And it's payed off.
If you haven’t already installed this for your vBulletin-powered site, I suggest you do it now. If you have, then you are ready to check your current Page Ranking values.
Besides running the sitemap generator, you should also manually submit your sites to your Google Sitemap Page. You can find it
here. After you have submitted your sites, submit your sitemap links according to each site’s individual setting. Then you have to wait while Google does its thing. As we all know, Google does everything in slow motion. So forget it for a month or more. If you have already done this some time ago then you should have stats available to determine your page rank status.
After Google has had time to index your site and run all of its functions for some time, you can go to your sitemap page and get an idea of where you are. When you click on your site in your sitemap page, you are taken to the Diagnostics page by default. You want to click on the Statistics tab to get to the meat of the matter. Once you have your Statistics page open, you will see the glory that you have achieved in the eyes of Google.
Notice the section at the bottom of the page titled “Your page with the highest PageRank?” This section will list your pages with the highest page rank for the last three months. Yes that includes the current month. As you can see from the attached image, our forum page was tops last month but currently our front page is the highest. That is probably how it should be. This means that more people are linking to the front page than the forums. So its ranking is higher. It could also mean that it simply has higher Page Ranking pages linking to it. In either case, it is currently the highest ranked page at vBulletin Modder.
Now let’s look at the section above this titled “The PageRank of your pages in Google.” This is your live PageRank not three month old data. No, they don’t give you numbers. But if you have several sites to compare you can get a pretty good idea. A little deductive reasoning is called for here.
Notice how most of our pages at vBulletin Modder are showing as “Low” PageRank? I have another site that is Page Ranking 4 and that is where its pages show. It has no color in the medium bar. So with this info, I can deduce that the “low” rank can go as high as PageRank 4. I don’t have any PageRank 5 sites, so I can’t confirm if five is included in this bar. Perhaps one of our members here at vBulletin Modder has this info and will care to comment on this. But with the info I have, I can safely say that PR 1 to 4 goes in this bar.
Notice how vBulletin Modder has a sliver of green in the medium section? From this I can deduce that we now have one or two pages at Page Ranking 5 or 6. Perhaps the home page is 6 and the forum page 5. Or the front page may be 5 and the forum page may be 4. That’s where this experiment becomes an inexact science. Nevertheless, from good deductive reasoning and a properly maintained sitemap page, we can get a good idea of where we are as far as Google ranking. A hard-working webmaster doesn’t need to wait three months to get encouraged to keep up the work. You can see the payoffs now.
So what are you waiting for? Go check out your little green bars and let us know what you find. And if you don’t have a sitemap or a sitemap page, it’s time to get to work. We have many members here at vBulletin Modder that can help you on your way.
