Last Wednesday — April 1, 2009 to be precise — Google was up to their usual tricks for April Fool’s Day. I didn’t pay much attention to their annual spoof, rather I soon found myself occupied with reviewing their PageRank export to the Google toolbar.

Yes, it appears that Google is hitting its stride with the all-important, but not that important Google PageRank update, by making changes on a quarterly basis. I say important because for some people it is the chief way that they measure their site’s worth, but I also say not important because there are many different factors and tools which tell how well a site is performing.

My PageRank Report Card

For the record, Matt’s Musings went from PR2 to PR3, WordJourney from PR3 to PR2, AutoTrends held steady at PR3 while The Article Writer is back up to PR4. FYI, The Article Writer made its debut at PR6 in June 2005 before gradually falling to PR5 before dropping to PR3.

Several tiny, niche sites (and even placeholder pages) I manage acquired their first ranking, PR1 to be exact, while my client’s two blogs at SayEducate.com and SayCampusLife.com managed to hold onto their previous PR4 position.

Other Ways To Measure Success

Granted, any drop in PageRank can be frustrating especially if you’ve been link building and using other methods to promote your site. However, there are other ways to measure the value of your website including:

Alexa Rank — Once widely panned by the SEO community, Alexa has gained some respect if only for their frequent updates which occur several times each month. The lower your Alexa number the higher your score.  However, it can easily be gamed through sites like Entrecard which encourage others to visit your site to inflate traffic numbers.

Google Analytics — If you run Google Analytics, you can gain an excellent understanding of your site’s traffic trends. While you won’t get a “rank” for how well your site performs, you will be able to gauge traffic numbers including page views, sources, and how well your AdWords campaigns perform.

Compete — Like Google Analytics, you can receive site traffic history and measure how your site compares against your chief competitors with Compete. Even in the basic (free) format, you can obtain some decent information about your site as well as your competition.

Semrush — Forget PageRank as I want to see how my sites perform with specific keywords. Recently, I discovered that the sharply increasing traffic to my The Auto Writer blog was bringing a lot of good attention my way. Turns out that I secured the #1 keyword phrase for a new vehicle about to be introduced, sending 200+ extra visitors to my site each day. Semrush has a freebie tool which can help you identify some of the results for free. Pay a monthly fee and you can get a hold of all of that information.

SERPs — You can check any search engine’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) manually to see how your site is doing. Honestly, I only check Google these days because of their dominance in the world of search. However, I also use Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to analyze all of my data.

Miscellany — Of course, I use Twitter to help build contacts online and have been particularly taken by Twitter Search which is an excellent way to find out who has been talking about your favorite topic recently.  I also like to use a good backlink checker to find out who is linking to me, I let Google notify me when certain keywords or phrases I’m following get mentioned. Additionally, I like to peak at domain tools when I want to obtain information about a client, a competitor or when I’m considering purchasing a domain or website.

So, as you can see PageRank doesn’t carry quite the weight that it some think that it should, given the many different measurements to quantify your site’s success. True, I would love to have a higher ranking from Google across my network of sites, but it is the other factors that weigh heavily and seem to bring fresh business my way.

Late last month I received a bid request from a company who wanted to increase the amount of content on their website. In their email to me they mentioned that their site was founded in 2000, had about 300 pages indexed by Google, and they believed that there were about 5000 inbound links.

I did  a little research myself and discovered that while the home page had a PageRank of 4, most of the main inner pages were PR3 or PR2, with deeper pages showing up as PR1, PR0, if that. Though PageRank isn’t critically important, I was a bit surprised to find that this site wasn’t ranked as well as it could have been. Checking some of their competitor’s sites I found much better results which had me wondering — what were they doing wrong?

Digging deeper I discovered some problems with the site, mistakes made by a webmaster which needed to be corrected:

• For quite a few internal pages, there wasn’t much linking between other pages on the site. I didn’t find that many outbound links either, but there should have been more links between existing pages on the same URL.

• Some of the internal pages were difficult to find. Likely, when the site was first started, these pages were linked to some other page on the site, but were no longer. Effectively orphaned, these lone internal pages were getting absolutely no benefit from other pages, hence the grayed out Google toolbar ranking.

When I mentioned these matters to the owner, he was surprised. Clearly, when the site was launched in Spring 2000, all of the pages were properly linked. A web designer and writer were hired to put the site together and everything worked fine. However, I did learn that the company — in a bid to save some money — made some changes to the site themselves early in 2003 and again in 2005 whereby content was updated, new pages added, and the design tweaked.

I also learned that the owner was the one who did all of the changes. Ugh.

Anyway, the client had contacted me initially with the purpose to have me rewrite a bunch of pages to bring them up to date. His thinking was that the fresh content would be recognized by the search engines and encourage the “bots” to visit his pages. Though this is true, I mentioned that he could save a whole lot of time (and money) if he added the links in himself and update the content as needed. Each page FTP’d to the internet would invite a crawl from Googlebot provided his site map was up to date.

Naturally, I found out that he didn’t even have a site map in place so I instructed him on how to get one.  I also shared Google’s Webmaster Guidelines link and encourage the client to visit Google Webmaster Tools to add and verify his site and do the same with Yahoo! Site Explorer.

As for me, I’ll be doing some other work for this client, but nothing involving fixing internal problems made by others.  Most times I’d rather have people clean up their own mess and take on fresh work without hassling with old stuff.  Besides, learning from one’s mistakes has its advantages, particularly when you manage your own business.