Hot-screensaver

I am so surprised and happy today when I noticed a change in the green bar on my web browser - the Google’s PageRank indicator bar. Hot-screensaver.com has now jumped from PR0 to PR4!

See the screenshot from my Firefox browser? You bet, it is showing PageRank 4. I have been waiting for this moment since the first day I started my blog about 2 months ago. Finally, a dream come true; I have actually dreamed a higher PageRank, but a 4 is quite good enough - I am not so greedy lar.

I quickly went to verify the PageRank on different Google datacenters by using Datacenter Quick Check tool from Mcdar.net. This is a very nice tool that will check a website’s PageRank and backlinks across different Google datacenters. Check screenshot below:

As you can see above, the PageRank is still zero on most of the datacenters, this is because those have yet to catch up with the update. Expect that to happen within the next few days.

What is Google’s PageRank?

PageRank (or PR in short) is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, invented PageRank at Stanford University. And while they have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all their web search tools.

PageRank explained by Google herself (Google is female?):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Quoted from Google Technology

How do you check for a site’s PageRank?

The most convenient way to check a website’s PageRank is by using Google’s toolbar (the Firefox version). It is as easy as downloading it and installing it. Then probably restart your browser.

If you are using Firefox, and hate the Google toolbar, then you can use some of the PR extensions that some nice people have created. I am using this extension here.

You can use the third option if you are too lazy to download anything, or you do not like installing things on your PC. Simply enter your website’s URL on these tools here or here or here…