I don’t really try to manipulate Google PR that much – I think Google kicks back too much these days in the short term at any rate – but I do like to see which pages:

  • get no visitors
  • are not linked to very much
  • are crawled less often or
  • have no visible toolbar pagerank
  • or can’t rank for their titles

… because then I can ask – should these pages be better optimised, and linked to more, combined or just removed from the site altogether, if totally irrelevant?

Recently I wanted to see at-a-glance the internal Pagerank of each page of a website, and it took me a while to actually find an internal PR checker that worked (Google has limits on how many pages you can check at once so most internal pr tools just don’t work anymore).

First you’ll need to grab a list of all your URLS of your site, and this little tool makes that easy – http://www.siteopsys.com/website-url-list-extractor.tool

If you want to see which pages of your site has Pagerank, this tool will show you – http://www.siteopsys.com/bulk-pr-checker.tool. It’s pretty cool and both tools are (for the moment) FREE.

The internal pagerank checker was very accurate in one sweep, and not that accurate in another – you might want to play about with it.

It only took a few minutes to get the Pagerank of a few hundred URLS I submitted.

Project Details: URL *******
Tool Name: Bulk Pagerank Checker
Project Name: Unassigned
No of URLs Queried: 684
Time Initiated: Thu May 06 00:35:30 IST 2010
Time Completed: Thu May 06 00:46:25 IST 2010
Total Time Taken: 655 Seconds
Credits Used: 10 (You can get 100 FREE credits if you register)

Up to 10 URLs – Free
11 to 50 URLs – 2 Credits
51 to 100 URLs – 4 Credits
101 to 250 URLs – 6 Credits
251 to 500 URLs – 8 Credits
501 to 1000 URLs – 10 Credits

NOTE – We’re talking Google Toolbar PR – the only clue to a web pages REAL PR we have. I think a page only needs a TINY amount of Pagerank to get into Google’s results, and RANKING is all down to a whole other set of criteria – you probably only need a lot of Pagerank if you have a LOT of pages.

Generally speaking, if you don’t link to a page via internal links very much, you are basically telling Google the page is not that important. If it’s not that important to you, Google won’t consider it that important to it either (if nobody else has bothered linking to the page – you are stuffed).

So, linking within your website from page-to-page, you should link to the pages you value most often – as you can’t just rely on links from external sites, which are harder to get (obviously) than internal links.

What you’ll probably find though, is Google does a good job of working out fairly useless pages, and slipping them into what used to be called supplemental results (a sort of back up set of results for obscure queries).

You could of course use Google Webmaster tools to see which pages are starved of internal links – that will give you an idea of your weaker pages, too, but doesn’t take into account links from external pages that introduce Pagerank to your site.

The more I think about internal links and Pagerank I think it comes down to %s rather than straight numbers – ie, which pages have the higher % of internal links – those are the most important pages on your site. Effectively, just about every site will have a % of pages that Google doesn’t need or want, so it’s probably not worth worrying about most pages without Toolbar PR too much.

And of course, just because a page has no visible Toolbar pagerank – doesn’t mean it’s not got any REAL pagerank.

Anyway, some might find these tools of use. AT LEAST THESE INTERNAL PR CHECKER TOOLS WORK.

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