Hi all,
After looking into this myself recently, page rank has become less and less important recently, and at the same time Google wants you to know it too. The reason for this is, a lot of websites go out there with a soul aim to achieve a high page rank, and in turn reap the rewards to top search rankings and huge payments for high PR links (something google frowns against). So instead, Google firstly is not letting us know our page rank as frequently, it now only updates your page rank in the tool bar a handful of times a year (not specified intervals). They state this in their support site, and tell people to not even worry about this factor at all (in attempt to stiffel those who attempt only high pagerank scores).
My Google Page Rank Hasn’t Increased in Ages!
If this is the case, it’s important not to worry about your website Google PageRank, you’re best of checking it infrequently, and worrying more about providing a good website, service, or community, the rest will follow. If you are worried, this may be because your intending to sell inks (this is against google terms and conditions, we advise you dont).
What has Google Done to Recently to stiffle ‘PageRank Whores’?
As we all know, a huge factor in Google Page rank is links. I have notice recently that Google does not provide hardly any information on many newer sites when using the link: command in the Google Search. When reading through the google support, I found references from google advising that if they don’t show up, not to worry, install google webmaster tools. I think this is an attempt to make such information more private, and stop people from finding out who links to who so easily (probably because of copycat techniques).
A way around finding inbound links is to use the + command. eg. +http://www.website.com/ – this will show references of this term from any other website, its not entirely accurate but you’ll be interested in what you see.
PageRank Spammers
Why do they do it? For many reasons, to achieve more traffic to their website, or to sell links, PageRank is big business, and can be manipulated by those using ‘blackhat seo’ most of these techniques are not sustainable, and can get your website banned.
