As many of you probably know, Google uses a measure called PageRank to evaluate the “importance” of Web pages. It’s a simple scale that goes from 0 to 10, with 0 being the least important and 10 the most. I found out only a couple weeks ago that you can actually check the PageRank of your site and others, for example at www.prchecker.info.
In case you’re curious (as I was), here are some PageRanks of some other sites, mostly chess-related. Let me just make one disclaimer: It is possible to have a great website that doesn’t score high on PageRank, and a not very great website that does score high. PageRank has nothing to do with content; it is based only on the pattern of links coming into your site and going out. (Of course, one way you can get a lot of links coming in is to have good content, so indirectly the PageRank may say something about the quality of a site. In fact, that’s the whole idea of using it as a search tool.)
With that disclaimer out of the way, here are how some of your favorite sites rank.
10: This rank is only for the kings of the Internet: Google, Facebook.
9: www.yahoo.com, www.wikipedia.com. These are Websites that are extremely general and important but not at the very top.
8: espn.go.com (ESPN, the TV sports network), www.harvard.edu. These are slightly more specialized sites, but obviously very authoritative in their field.
7: www.chessbase.com. The only pure chess website I could find with a rank this high.
6: www.chessclub.com (Internet Chess Club), www.fide.com (the International Chess Federation), www.chessvibes.com, www.chessdom.com, www.chesscafe.com, susanpolgar.blogspot.com. To get a rank this high, you need a high-volume site with a team of people maintaining it. The only chess blog that ranks this high is Susan Polgar’s. Her ranking is well-deserved, because the site has a ton of news, but I suspect she has help.
5: www.uschess.org, www.chess.com, www.newinchess.com, www.chessninja.com/dailydirt (Mig Greengard), www.thechessmind.net (Dennis Monokroussos), www.danamackenzie.com/blog (yours truly!). Some real surprises here. I can’t believe the official USCF website isn’t a 6 or higher. Same with New in Chess, a leading chess magazine, and chess.com, which has a URL to die for. Mig Greengard and Dennis Monokroussos deserve their rankings. I definitely do not belong in such company.
4: lizzyknowsall.blogspot.com (Elizabeth Vicary), nezhmet.wordpress.com (Mark Ginsburg), pogonina.com (Natalia Pogonina), fpawn.blogspot.com (Michael Aigner), www.uschessleague.com. This is a reasonable PageRank for a good chess blog. I should really be here, not in the PageRank 5 group. I would move Elizabeth up to PR 5, because she has many followers.
3: www.hikarunakamura.com (Hikaru Nakamura), kaydentroff.blogspot.com (Kayden Troff), chessadventures.blogspot.com (Anonymous). As these examples show, PageRank is quite different from fame! If you’re famous but your blog is too narrowly self-centered, doesn’t have enough links to the outside world, or isn’t updated often enough, then a PR 3 is your destiny.
2: www.bradenbournival.com. I found it really interesting to hunt for pages with PageRanks lower than 3. They’re not so easy to find, because by definition they don’t have a lot of links going to them and they don’t show up very highly on Google searches. Braden Bournival’s is a quirky little blog, and I think it’s not bad at all. Check out his description of the strengths and weaknesses of well-known U.S. players, along with a theme song for each of them! I had to laugh when I got to Irina Krush, whose theme song was “Maneater”! (Because she’s beaten so many men at chess.) Why is this blog only a PR 2? My guess is that it’s because his posts are sporadic (his blog was out of commission for several months) and his quirkiness may be off-putting to some people.
1: timothytaylorartist.com. Now this one really came as a shock me. It belongs to a well-known International Master, who has had articles published in Chess Life! I’ve met Tim and played against him. Why does he pull only a PR 1? Well, the graphics are a problem (the boards are painful to look at, and the page layout is like Blog Standard) and, to some extent, the attitude is also a problem. Give us a reason to want to read your blog, Tim. Mark Ginsburg’s would be a great model to follow.
0: www.xx2e.info. This one you have to see for yourself. If you dare. And if it’s even there any more. It has a page design that makes you ask, “WTF”? It claims to be about checkers, chess, backgammon, etc. The posts are completely random, and strongly resemble spam messages (i.e., some robot just scraped some text off the Internet). There is not really any indication that any human is running this website. Half of the links lead to error messages written in Japanese. (Including, when I checked just now, the home page. To get a link that worked, I had to link to one of the posts. But I wouldn’t count on the above link working for long!)
My hypothesis is that Google reserves PageRank 0 for web sites that aren’t really web sites: e.g., spam sites, or sites run by robots. I sure hope I haven’t infected my computer with a virus …
One final note: All PageRanks mentioned in this entry are current as of July 2011. If you’re reading this article in, say, 2013, they have probably changed.
