An introduction to PageRank and mozRank
The best way to evaluate a blog (or any other website) is to take a good look at it. Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look professional and attractive? And most importantly, is the content useful, thought-provoking, or entertaining? Only a real person can answer those questions in a meaningful way.
However, there are some things that are best measured with numbers, and the power of a site’s profile of inbound links is one of those things. For a viewer, the quality and quality of inbound links isn’t so important, but if you’re looking at another blog as a potential partner and want to find out whether it’s well established, well respected, and putting effort into growth, the links are crucial.
Google and the other major search engines all evaluate site ‘authority’ based on the inbound links. Like people, websites are judged on the quality of their friends. Those with lots of friends (or just a few popular friends) are thought to be trustworthy. Those with few friends are unknown quantities, and those that associate with shady characters get a bad reputation by association.
The most popular scale bloggers and webmasters use to express link profile quality is called PageRank, or PR. Values run from 0 to 10. The higher a site’s PR is, the better its authority is and the better it can do in search engine rankings.
All sites start out with 0 and a well-established site might have PR3 or 4. It takes serious effort to get above 5, and anything above 6 or 7 is quite rare. Even YouTube, the third most popular site on the internet, only has PR9.
It’s not just about having a lot of links. Quality counts too- one link from a PR5 site could be worth half a dozen from PR1 sites- and there are other factors at work. If yours is the only link coming from a popular PR4 site it’ll count for a whole lot more than a link from a similar site that links to hundreds of others.
The one frustration many people feel with PageRank is that it’s not updated frequently. As you build links your search rankings may go up, but the publicly-visible PR value may not change at all. The owner of a new blog could put in months of hard link building work and still have a PR0 site. That’s where mozRank or mR comes in. It’s similar to PR in that the scale runs from 0 to 10, but mR figures are usually expressed to at least one decimal place, and the tables get updated far more frequently. Build the links and it’ll show up on your mozRank much faster.
When you’re looking at a blog, the best thing to do is check both mozRank and PageRank. A site with reasonable PR and mR figures has a well-established link profile. Low PageRank and higher mozRank means they’re working hard but perhaps haven’t got such a long history, and if both measures are low, they haven’t got many inbound links in place.
PR and mR can be measured for any site. The easiest way to do it is to download the free SEO toolbars from SEOMoz and SEObook. Checking your own values gives you a good way of measuring progress and seeing where you are compared to other bloggers, and checking other people’s values gives you an idea just how strong they are when it comes to organic search.
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Hi Guys. Thanks for visiting my blog, you must be full with the energy since you trying hard to find me here at the corner ;) I assume that you must be very curious about me.
mozRank gives a much better recent view of the website you are visiting which is important when you are looking to build relationships and looking for guest posting opportunities. Sometime it takes months for PR to get updated, so unless there is a recent toolbar PR update it becomes irrelevant.
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Thanks. you gave a clear idea about mozrank, but still it is the page rank that matters when advertisers or partners are looking to new blogs. So it is usual to wait and continue to the link building thing what a webmaster has started.
And still I prefer pagerank over mozrank.
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/ July 26, 2011
I did a little digging into the technical side of Mozrank and was quite impressed with how they calculate a page’s rank. They use a link analysis algorithm similar to the one Google uses. They also take both internal and external links into account. While Google PageRank remains the ranking system of choice for advertisers, Mozrank should be used in conjunction with PageRank to give a much more rounded view of a site’s popularity.
Before reading this post i don’t know about mozRank. Quite interesting. Thanks
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/ July 28, 2011
I gotta admit that I consider myself reasonably informed about blogs, blogging, social media etc. So I was pleasantly suprised when you mentioned mozRank. This is the first time I have heard about it.
I immediately when to seomoz and downloaded their toolbar. While it did make me feel good about mRank (my site had mRank of 4.83), I don’t know how valuable or trustworthy this number is.
But one thing is for sure – it made my day. Instead of looking at a PR 0, now I can boast of a mR 4.83. Yay me!
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Congrats for your Ranks Amanda, hope it will getting better everyday
In the regards to PageRank, I wouldn’t really worry too much about it. I’ve found it to be a rather useless and over-hyped number that way too many people obsess about.
But to each their own, I suppose.
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Yes you can do that Daniel but most of advertiser still consider about your page rank
Now by advertiser what exactly do you mean? Do you mean someone buying link ads on your website? If that is the case, PR is still worthless as paid links have to be nofollow otherwise you and the advertiser face penalties.
I’m not sure about the penalties Daniel, but PR still work to get advertiser for your blog.
Maybe the horrible advertisers. If I was an advertiser I’d be more concerned about a websites traffic, as PR doesn’t always mean traffic. And after all, more traffic = more possible conversions for the advertiser.
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Remember that PR just one of the requirements for the advertisers, the important thing is your blog’s traffic or page views Daniel.
I never heard about Mozrank before… Very interesting..
I wonder if this is a good thing or not though… After PR, Alexa, now we need another factor to worry about? SEO is getting more and more complicated..
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Don’t worry too much Lonnie, just enjoy your blogging and doing your seo well
Some bloggers love to get PR, others like to get better Alexa rank which shows site popularity among readers. But I think still PR shows a unique value of a site
Twitter: sanjaykhemlani
/ August 26, 2011
I do know about mozRank but totally ignore it. After reading your post I downloaded the plugin and installed it, now I have to add this to my “Top Priority list”. Thanks! Btw, a link to the toolbar would be helpful to users don’t you think?
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