There are many ranking tools out there by different companies. The one that we will be focusing on in this article is Google’s Page Rank (PR) system.

PR can be viewed by using the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com). There are also sites on the web that will let you look up PR.

The PR system gives website pages a rank between one and ten, ten being the highest. PR is not a replacement of finding a site’s search engine rank on Google, but it is used for link exchanges, which will be discussed later. In fact PR is something separate from a site’s ranking on search engines, it is a calculation of how many pages are being linked together. The links may not be relevant, and as a result just because a page has a high PR doesn’t mean it will rank higher in a search then another page with a lower PR.

Here is a quick list of some sites and their PR:

• http://www.google.com/ (10)
• http://www.msn.com/ (9)
• http://slashdot.org/ (9)
• http://microsoft.com (10)
• http://yahoo.com (9)

Keep in mind that the page itself is given a PR. For example, the homepage of msn.com is 9, but http://movies.msn.com/movies/ drops down to a 6.

In Summary:

• Page rank is based on a scale of 1 to 10 and reflects a pages link popularity
• Page rank is based on quantity not quality; link relevance does not matter