Last time I checked (a long time ago… yesterday!), the Rick Beckman archive had a Google PageRank of 0/10. I could live with that, but it gave me something to work for. My old blog, watch-therefore.com, (the domain redirects to here now) had (and apparently still has) a PageRank of 5/10. Moving up from 0 certainly isn’t difficult, by any means.
Today, when I browsed to my blog, the Search Status displays caught my attention. The Alexa Rank was the standard 614,000 or so, but I had to do a double-take when I saw the PageRank display. I refreshed the page to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Could it be? Was it possible? Yes! 5/10! Equilibrium has been restored! Vindicated after 3 long… months! Fame! Fortune! Recognition!
Okay, I’m getting carried away.
Still, I find it an enjoyable, if vain, pastime to keep tabs on my site’s stats (well, this site at least). And as such, I cannot help but wonder what caused the zero-to-five jump in the site’s rank, especially only after (less than) 3 months. I wonder if it could have had something to do with the change I made yesterday: finally redirecting watch-therefore.com to timothysburden.com rather than a more-and-more obsolete archive of old blog stuff. Could a “301 Moved Permanently” HTTP status cause a transfer of PageRank overnight? I can’t help but be curious.
PageRank is some mysterious voodoo, to be sure. I can’t get Google to show me any backlinks to the Rick Beckman archive, yet somehow they ascribe to the site a PageRank of 5/10. PageRank is supposed to be heavily influenced by backlinks, so I’m not for sure what is going on there. Any ideas?
Hahaha! Okay, Rick, now I think I can feel okay calling you a nerd. :)
Anyway, 5/10? Is that good or something? (I don’t know what anything you just said means, but I’ll humour you, how about that?) :)
The higher a site’s PageRank, the higher quality Google believes the site to be, as they state on their Technology page. So yes, a 5/10 is quite good!
However, the scale only measures what their algorithms can determine. Certainly, from our perspective a 0/10 PageRank Christ-honoring Christian site is vastly more important than a 9 or 10/10 sin-honoring site.
Despite that important difference, however, the higher our PageRank, the more likely we’ll end up in search results, which means that as long as we speak the truth here, that truth will be spread farther easier. That’s a good thing in my book!
And yes, I’m a nerd. And proud of it.