This is for the SEO geeks among us. But it appears that Google has updated the Toolbar Pagerank this past weekend. I’m happy to note that the Union Street Media site is holding steady, that this blog debuted favorably and that our internal pages, like our real estate web design page, are also now earning more Pagerank than previously. I’ll go into a little more detail about PageRank for those internet marketing folks who are just getting into SEO and all that after the break.

Uhh, what’s Page Rank?

Pagerank, commonly shortened to PR, is one of the pieces of Google’s algorithm. Every page in Google’s index has an assigned PR from 1 to 10. Pagerank is supposed to indicated a page’s value: an indicator of inbound links, length of existence etc. Having a high PageRank won’t necessarily have an impact on your placement on the search engine results page (SERP). This is what confuses most people when trying to understand PageRank. PageRank flows from your site out through any links you have to another site. You can imagine it, perhaps, as a bucket with some water in it. Every link in your site is a hole in the bucket out of which water leaks. The amount of holes in your bucket is up to you. The amount of water in your bucket is Google’s PageRank.

So what should I do about PageRank?

Here are two things you can do with your knowledge of PageRank:

• Identify sites with high PageRank and try to get links to your site from them.
• Identify pages on your site with high PageRank and link out to other sites/pages that you think are good.

I’ll admit that’s not much to go on. Mostly, use PageRank as a way to help you allocate your resources for locating and gaining inbound links as well as promoting your favorite links. If you get really fancy with this, eventually you’ll get into a discipline called Pagerank Sculpting. But all of this Pagerank business aside, if you consistently focus on making good content that people find useful you won’t ever really have to know much about Pagerank. It will just come your way.