Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Best free tools—Page Rank checking
I'm continuing my Sunday practice of sharing links to some of my favorite free web marketing tools. This time, we'll look at tools for checking sites' Google PageRank. The importance of Google PageRank has diminished in many search engine optimizers' eyes recently, as Google has grown increasingly secretive of the PageRank figure that they actually assign to a page.

For the most part, the PageRank that appears in the Google Toolbar is no more than a snapshot of what the page's PageRank was a some undetermined time in the past few months. Thus the PageRank cannot be taken as anything more than an approximation of the figure that Google actually uses.

But, at any rate, PageRank is like heroin to many people involved in seo. We crave it, even though we know it does us more harm than good in optimizing their sites.

But here are some of the best sites for finding out Google's (revealed) PageRank of ranking pages.

PRSearch
PR Search lets you enter a keyword into their search box. The results it returns also display the Google PageRank for the site. I'm not sure whose search results they use, but it can be very instructive in seeing the way PageRank varies over the top sites in the results.

Webmasterbrain PageRank search
Webmasterbrain has a similar tool. But it's even more flexible. It lets you determine how many results you want it to return, up to 100. And it lets you choose between seeing the results ranked by relevance or by PageRank.

CheckSum Code
And if you're of a technical nature, you might be interested in an attempt that one programmer has made to reconstruct the code Google uses to assign PageRank. Does it work? I haven't a clue. But to all you people out there do have a clue: enjoy!
Jeff