5

Any suggestion would be appreciated. Maybe a tool (or online service) that you used at least once.

I have list of webistes in a txt file. I need a tool or an oline service (possibly free) that finds the Google PR for each one of these websites, and shows me back a list (maybe sorted in order of PR value).

I saw some online service but they usually find PR for 25/50 sites at a time. I need this tool to be able to check PR for 1000 sites, or at least 300/400 at a time.

1
  • 2
    If you're chasing PR you've lost before you've even started.
    – John Conde
    Aug 22, 2010 at 14:13

2 Answers 2

10

In all honesty, that would be a waste of your time.

Visible PageRank is only one of over 200 factors that Google uses to determine the rank of a page on a search engine results page. On top of that, it's only updated every few months, while the results themselves are updated several times a day. At best, visible PageRank is a crude approximation of how Google views any page.

I help moderate a webmaster forum. I certainly won't question your motives, but I'll write this for anyone else who might be reading this. Generally, when we see people with gigantic lists of websites, it means that they want to try to get backlinks from all of these websites, usually through a blog comment or forum post. Usually, those people, whether they know it or not, end up spamming those websites. Please, please, please, for the sake of all of those websites, only post a link or make a comment if it's relevant and useful to the page on which it'll appear. If it's not relevant, useful, and desired; it's spam.

What's more, there are better ways to improve your site's position in Google. All of the time spent trying to build backlinks, whose value can't even be objectively measured, could instead be spent on your site and users. Concentrate on your site, your strategy, your users, and your content and the rest will follow.

In the end, increasing your visible PageRank doesn't get you anything tangible. It does not guarantee any of the following:

  • Better rankings
  • More traffic
  • More users
  • More conversions
  • More revenue

In fact, the only thing that increasing your visible PageRank achieves is a slightly longer green bar and a larger number next to it. Other than that, it doesn't mean a thing.

Chasing PageRank is a time sink and a money pit.

Don't fall into it.

Edit in response to Marco's comment:

@Marco - While I don't disagree that backlinks are a vital part to ranking well in Google, I'd like to encourage you to think about ways to get people to link to you rather than you creating the links yourself.

Simply put, how much is your time worth? $10/hr? $50/hr? $100+/hr? Can you quantify how much a single link will help your page? How much will that link cost you to create according to your hourly wage?

Let's do the math. For a good comment or forum post that isn't automated and isn't spam, it usually takes about a minimum of 5 minutes to find the site, read the article, type the comment, check, edit if necessary, and submit. At $10/hour, that link cost you $0.83. At $20/hour, it becomes $1.66. At $50/hour it costs $4.15. For $100/hour, it's $8.30.

Now think about scale. You're not sure how much impact one link will have in boosting your page, so you'll need more. But how many more? 10 links at $20/hour will cost $16.60. At $100/hour, it'll cost you $83.00.

But is 10 links enough?

What about 100 links? 100 links at $20/hour will cost $166.00. At $100/hour, it'll cost you a whopping $830.00.

That's just one page. How many pages are on your site? If you had to do it for 10 pages, 10 pages with 100 links each at $20/hour will cost $1660.00. At $100/hour, it'll cost you $8300.00.

But what if you had to get links to 100 pages?

How long can your business sustain those prices? And is PageRank an accurate and relevant enough measurement that you can point to it and say, I saw a good monetary ROI on my link building campaign? This is what I mean when I said I doubted the long-term viability of any business that chases PageRank.

Let's do a quick case study. A while back ago, I wrote an article titled, Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs. I knew it was a sore spot for developers and I wanted to write something authoritative on the subject, so I spent a good deal of time researching and writing the article.

I did what I was supposed to in terms of on-page SEO. I did extensive keyword research, I crafted my title to contain the keywords and also to be linkbait, I used all the right heading tags.

When it came time to publish, I didn't spend time trying to get thousands of links. Instead, I submitted to Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and a few other sites, maybe 10 in total. Total time spent marketing it was maybe 45 minutes. Within a few hours, I was on front page of Reddit. The first day brought in about 15,000 visitors.

To date, that page has 3,090 backlinks (according to Yahoo Site Explorer), at least 1,866 tweets (much more, but that's just what my retweet widget counts), 3660 saved bookmarks on delicious, and it brings in around 650 visitors a day through the search engines and links.

The page now has a PageRank of 5. A PR5 and I didn't do anything to chase it or try to get links from high PR pages.

What I did do, however, is create something that people wanted to link to and tell others about. And then I put it in front of them using just a few social media links.

Let's say that I make $50 an hour. How much would promotion of my article have cost if I wanted to get the same number of links myself? $12,823.50. I'll tell you the truth, I can't afford that and I don't think many people can.

If you think strategically with your content and put it in front of the people who will link to it, you'll get a lot more links at a lower cost than you would if you did them all yourself.

That, however, isn't the end or even the moral of the story.

Now let's take a look at what I actually got in terms of revenue from the time I spent on the article. As a rough estimate, I made $70 in advertising. To date, I haven't had any clients because of the article.

It certainly took more than 2 hours to write the article, so in monetary terms, it was a big net loss.

The problem is that, while I got a good deal of traffic because of the article, my website wasn't properly monetized. The page's PR5 didn't make my business money. The traffic didn't really make money. At this time, the website isn't designed to pull in a lot of revenue from advertising or other offers.

One could argue that you must also consider brand equity. I do think that the article generated a lot of goodwill in the web design community and has helped a lot of people, but so far that hasn't translated into work, product sales, or ad revenue.

What I learned from the experience is that traffic isn't enough. I essentially wasted an enormous opportunity because the website wasn't set up to make money. I'm currently redesigning the website to make better use of advertising. I'm also creating several products that can be used to help monetize the site. I also plan on creating several email lists to build a client base.

The point is this, if you own a website in hopes of making money, don't waste your time (and as a consequence, money) on things that don't directly contribute to that. Think strategically and think in terms of ROI. Anything else will send you tilting after windmills.

8
  • +1 True enough, though the non-technical manager-type really prefers green bar and a number to look at...
    – danlefree
    Aug 21, 2010 at 22:38
  • 1
    Visible PR, however does help you 'value' ad or link placement on any given page that you have. On a blog with 1600+ "pages", it is very useful to have an overview. Yes, I know, PR doesn't mean much, but people do seem accustomed to paying more for an ad spot on a PR6 page as opposed to a PR2 page, if the ad is a direct (paid) text link.
    – Tim Post
    Aug 21, 2010 at 23:28
  • @Tim - True, but I'd argue that that system of advertising is fundamentally broken. PageRank isn't necessarily an indication of traffic volume or type. Advertisers would be 1000 times better off inquiring about page views and audience. To me, and this is just my personal opinion, if someone is buying text links based on PageRank alone, I'd question the long term viability of their business. Aug 21, 2010 at 23:51
  • @Virtuosi Media: obviously I would like to try to get backlinks from the sites that have a bigger PR. And I can not disagree more with you and even Matt Cutts (mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting) that PR is not important. Better PR meaNs DEFINITELY better ranking!!! I agree it's not only PR that makes the site rank higher, but all the fixes that I can make to my websites to improve my contents can be done by me since I have FTP access to my webiste. When I have don those, the only other thing to rank higher is to get incoming links from site with big PR!!! Aug 22, 2010 at 9:58
  • 1
    @Virtuosi Media: +1 (sad that I can not upvote you mopre than once) 1st all thanks for the time you took to give me such a long reply. 2nd you did not reply directly to the question, but you really made me think, your point is unassailable and really clever!!! Thanks so much for make me think and to show me a good way on how to manage a company blog (compared to hunderds of frims that use the blog only to write articles about their NOT INTERESTING new services or about the birthdays of their own employees). BTW you have a very nice celan looking website. Aug 23, 2010 at 10:24
0

You can check out this sofware know as Parameter in which we can add the url and then find the PR's for all the url's http://www.mytechshout.com/bulk-check-google-page-rank-updates-easily-parameter-software.html

1
  • Lone link is considered a poor answer (see faq) since it is meaningless by itself and target resource is not guaranteed to be alive in the future. It would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.
    – j0k
    Feb 15, 2013 at 8:13

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.