Foreign Perspectives

What is a little peculiar to look at are some of the values the pagerank prediction tools are producing at the moment for the site.

For me, the most interesting collection of little site monitoring tools is that at iWebTool which has recently changed it’s prediction from a quite respectable PR5 to a PR6. Will we get that next time round though? I can’t honestly see us sitting at PR6 this time next month (the pagerank review is due in early April) but PR5 would be quite nice.

They arrive at these predictions basically by looking at the number of backlinks (ie links to) our site. So, when the last pagerank review came up a few months ago we had around 1000 links to our site and thereby ended up with PR2. That was a so-so start though I think we’d have been PR3 if the site had been in operation longer. Now though we have almost 10,000 links to the site picked up by iWebTool and almost as many again when I look at the site via google’s webmaster tools. That’s more links than all the rest of my sites put together so I think it’s fairly safe to say that the minimum PR next time will be 4 and might be 5 if the site is now old enough for it’s age not to act as a drag on the pagerank.

Does the pagerank really matter though? Well, the figure quoted by google probably doesn’t but what is obvious is that the pagerank that they’re using internally for FP is much higher than PR2 as the site appears considerably higher in searches than it did a few months ago (or even last month for that matter). Ironically, all this improvement in FP has happened despite me doing virtually no promotion of the site whereas even with a good deal of effort being put into promoting a number of my other sites, none have had the performance improvement that FP has had. So great is that improvement, that I’m toying with the idea of restructuring some of the sites as blogs.