Remember the 80’s movie Can’t Buy Me Love? Patrick Dempsey plays Ronald Miller, a geeky unpopular kid who ends up paying a popular girl, Amanda Peterson, to act as his girlfriend so others will think that he, too, is cool. Guess what, it worked! Now hold that thought.

Yesterday, I made a post about Alexa Ranking and stated that although she gives you a good gauge of where your blog stands, there are other ways to measure success for your site. As you can guess by the title, Google PageRank is one of them. If Alexa is your hot female friend, Google PageRank is your nerdy sidekick .

Rather than looking at your average daily visitors and your average pageviews over the last three months, like Alexa does, Google PageRank uses a ballot-type system. Here’s how Google describes it:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

What does that mean for you? Well, it means that not all backlinks (inbound links) are equal. If an immensely popular website links to your blog, it will have a much greater effect than a link from a website that was just created a few days ago. It makes total sense though: if CNN links to my site, it should carry more weight then my mom’s personal blog, right? If we get enough of these giants to rub shoulders with, then Google bumps us up their scale. So when you’re looking for people or websites to have links leading to your blog, you might want to choose wisely.

The Google PageRank system is actually a complex algorithm that most of us will never really need to be that intimate with. All you need to know is that every site starts with PageRank 0 and as it gains more important “friends”, it goes up. (A site that isn’t even on the Google radar is PageRank ‘Unranked’.) The highest possible PageRank is 10 but only a small number of sites get there. Even a site with an incredible amount of views like ESPN only has PageRank 8 even though it currently has an Alexa Rank of 78.

Just like with Alexa, you can also get a Google PageRank Firefox add-on so you can see the each site’s score as you browse. I actually use SearchStatus, which shows me both (and other metrics) on my status bar.

Anyway, the point is, don’t just go for sheer quantity of backlinks. Quality of the links are very important. I’d rather have a link from a site with a PageRank 4 than a hundred links from sites with PageRank 0. BTW, PageRank 4 is really good, even though it sounds low. That said, if that PageRank 4 site has a lot of links going out, we all lose value.

So which indicator should we use, Alexa or Google PageRank? You can use both since they tell a slightly different story. One way to look at them is Alexa ranking tells you how popular are you are while Google PageRank tells you how many powerful friends you have.

In the meantime, keep posting fresh material on your blog because every time you add content, Google indexes from your site and that will also help boost your PageRank. But keep your eyes open for Amanda Peterson and when you see her, do whatever you can to make her your girlfriend, even if you have to give up your entire summer’s worth of lawn mowing savings.

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