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I am just getting started in SEO, and I want to check the Page Rank of one of my sites. All google docs say to use their toolbar to check Page Rank. However I'm using Chromium. I could check with Firefox, but I'm curious if there's a way to check the page rank without using it. I see many sites for checking it, but they all seem a little spammy.

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    I find it delightfully ironic that Chrome (by default) offers no means to do this.
    – Tim Post
    Commented Jul 21, 2010 at 17:45
  • You say Chrome can't do it by default, is there some way to turn it on? (And yes I'm suprised google haven't released a toolbar for this for their browser)
    – Amandasaurus
    Commented Jul 21, 2010 at 18:23
  • The google toolbar isn't the only toolbar that shows the PageRank.
    – nute
    Commented Jul 22, 2010 at 20:45
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    Simple answer, NO. This whole question rendered moot as Google doesn't provide PageRank anymore and any third party claiming to be able to display it is fluffing... Reduced to being another Cargo Cult SEO meme now.
    – Fiasco Labs
    Commented Dec 6, 2014 at 2:35

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PageRank is a useless metric to chase and I wouldn't bother with it. With that caveat, if you know PHP and have a host that supports it, check out this tutorial: http://bohuco.net/blog/2010/07/google-ranking-checker-class-in-php/

Also, just for clarification, websites don't have PageRank, individual pages do.

Edit: Here is a PageRank checker for Chrome.

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  • It's indeed useless, the website I am building at the moment doesn't have a page rank and still score a page 2 and a page 5 on some keyword for Google.
    – HoLyVieR
    Commented Jul 21, 2010 at 20:25
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    Yep, that's what their own Webmaster help site says about it too: sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/… : "In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank"
    – Zhaph - Ben Duguid
    Commented Jul 23, 2010 at 2:24
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As of November 2014, Google announced that is not going to be updating Pagerank as available from the Google Toolbar.

Any means of checking Pagerank is no longer going to work. The Google toolbar and all third party PR checkers will only show old stale data.

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There's a few website based solutions you could try, such as:

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There are several web apps that can do this for you, I personally use CubeStat

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As far as I know, there is currently no way of doing this via an API, though there are some hacks (and many sites that will report on this for you). Use your favourite search engine to search for "my pagerank" for a long list of sites.

Be aware that raw PageRank doesn't really mean a lot in terms of position in the SERPs; it's more bragging rights than anything. It is only one of may factors that Google uses to determine relevance, authority, trust, etc.

Have a look at this analysis of Google's Reasonable Surfer patent for some of the factors that Google considers for relevance. There are many other tidbits / clues out there for other factors, but going down the garden path of trying to understand Google is a recipe for LOTS of hard work and, ultimately, insanity :)

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In many cases, PageRank is just one of the many factors you may consider, while doing SEO (I don't think it's 100% useless, it wouldn't be used otherwise), so I'd go for the tool that shows more page/domain data:

  • Page PageRank
  • Domain PageRank
  • Domain Age
  • Domain IP
  • Alexa rank
  • Indexing date
  • Number of domain pages indexed
  • Number of incoming and outgoing links
  • Maybe, some social signals - tweets, likes, +1s, etc. (when it does matter)

So far, I've been using SEO Quake for web-based checking and website auditor (desktop) for deeper site analysis. I do love SEO Quake's Diagnosis button to get a quick overview:

SEO Quake Diagnosis

And here's the kind of website auditor's report I usually run:

Website auditor site report

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Toolbar Pagerank (which was never Pagerank) is, arguably, the single greatest public relations stunt Google has ever pulled off.

There's some very clever psychology in using a single, reductive statistic to completely misdirect the attention of tens of thousands of webmasters worldwide from what they should be paying attention to. (organic search referrals, pages visited, visit duration, repeat visits etc.)

As of November 2014, even Google has said Toolbar Pagerank will no longer be updated and is henceforth a meaningless metric.

It underlines just how clever Google's early-2000s PR was that even after they announce this publicly, Toolbar Pagerank Fever refuses to subside in some quarters.

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I use the PageRank Extension, but there's heaps more under "PageRank" in the extensions library.

As others have said though, it's not a very valid way of judging a site, though I do still have it there out of curiosity.

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By Chromium do you mean the Google Chrome Browser?

There are plenty of extensions to Chrome that can show the PageRank, just search for "SEO" in the extension library.

But then again, I agree with everyone that says that PageRank is not that interesting. However most of those add-ons show you more than that, so they could be interesting.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/oangcciaeihlfmhppegpdceadpfaoclj?hl=en

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  • Chromium is a version of Google Chrome that has been recompiled for the Linux desktop.
    – Amandasaurus
    Commented Jul 26, 2010 at 13:30
  • Chromium doesn't have anything to do with Linux; it's the open-source version of Chrome that's a sort of test-bed for new features and forks.
    – Andrew Lott
    Commented Jul 3, 2013 at 13:03

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