Page Rank and Me
Page Rank is a critical part of the glue that holds the world wide web together.
Part of the algorithm that google apply for ranking sites in search results relies on a value known as PageRank, supposedly named after Larry Page, one of google's founders. Wikipedia has a good article about PageRank.
According to google:
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".
Basically, webpages are assigned some value that empirically represents the quantity of links pointing to that page, weighted by the authority of those links. It can be considered, in some way, a measure of a webpages' popularity and authority.
There are numerous websites that can tell you the pank rank of a specific page, including www.mygooglepagerank.com. That particular site can give you a small icon to include on you page so visitors can see the page rank. Why you would want to do that, I am not sure. However, it gave me an idea for an interesting experiment to answer a simple question: What is the page rank of each page in this website?
To answer my question, I constructed a page that in addition to being a site map displays the page rank of each of the pages. You are welcome to visit my Page Rank Map.
As of today, the result of my experiment is that my entire site has a page rank of zero! A google query of "site:saa.dyndns.org" confirms that the site is fully indexed. Therefore the reason for the low page ranks are that the site is unpopular!
I'll be interested to see how this progresses over time. I'll probably be more interested than anyone else. Other sites that I manage, that I was at one time responsible for, or over which I have some degree of control, typically have a Page Rank of between 4 and 6 provided that they've been on the web for at least a year or two. Based on this, my hypothesis is that the page rank will develop as soon as I actually write an article that someone might be interested in. I expect that will be sometime late 2010.
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