If you’re a blogger, you already know what Google’s PageRank is. You have probably heard of mozRank as well. If not, you’ll be hearing that term a lot more in the future. PageRank is a complicated algorithm Google invented for each and every single website in the world wide web to provide some kind of a ranking system for the purposes of their search engine optimization. Nobody really knows how this ranking is calculated, except Google themselves, and is not often updated. Because of this fact, many bloggers and website webmasters have been complaining, especially for those whose sites are provided with a very low ranking. You can still go to PRChecker.info and enter any URL of a website to fetch its current page rank. But since it’s tedious to check each site independently, you can download a toolbar that automatically fetches the page rank for whatever site you’re visiting at that moment. According to Google, you can improve your ranking and search engine visibility by increasing the number of quality links that link back to your website. That’s probably the only active thing you can do to help your ranking.
mozRank overtakes PageRank
But the problem is that Google has not been updating their PageRank system. So for those who were at Page Rank 0 or 1 in the beginning of the year, you’re probably still a 0 or 1, even though you have generated much more quality links that link back to your site. This is where mozRank comes in. mozRank is also a complicated website ranking algorithm regulated by the people of SEOmoz.org.
The purpose of the ranking is basically identical to Google’s PageRank, but is updated much more frequently than Google. It’s SEOmoz’s method of determining link popularity metric of a website that shows how popular it is on the web. More and more bloggers and advertisers are pointing to mozRank as their number 1 method of determining authority and popularity of all websites. Soon, PageRank will no longer be the go-to ranking system of choice and mozRank will overtake that reign.
To check mozRank of a webpage simply go to seomoz.org/linkscape and enter the url of a website. Then refer to Full List Of Link Metrics tab to find the mozRank. Alternatively, you can visit bloggrader.com or websitegrader.com and enter your url .
Other Metrics
There are still other resources bloggers use to gauge popularity of a website. Alexa is very common and is updated almost everyday. The ranking score is based on how much traffic a website receives compared to all of the other websites that are available around the globe. For instance, Google.com has a ranking of 1 because it’s the most trafficked website in the world. Alexa uses a 3-month rolling average of the total visitors coming to a website, along with the number of pageviews each visitor provides. Just visit Alexa.com and enter the url to discover the Alexa ranking of that site. Still, there are others who use the Compete Score to help determine the popularity and/or authority of a website. Compete score is similar to Alexa, but only accounts for unique visitors only. Similarly, you can visit Compete.com and enter the url of a website to see its Compete score for free.
Value Calculators
There are plenty of 3rd party sites that offer a valuation of any website for free. URLAppraisal.net provides a simple calculated results for any requested website. It provides Compete Score, Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Number of Links, and the final assessed value. Cubestat.com is very similar to URLAppraisal but is only updated on a monthly basis. SEMRush.com is another site I like. They provide a value of the website purely based on the number of Google search engine results generated from keywords. Although these websites are useful tools to evaluate the value of a website, they shouldn’t be used as a set standard.
All of these sources are great to help determine the popularity of a website. However, none of these metrics are 100% accurate, including the mozRank, but they all help serve to provide a guidance. Though there are many tactics and strategies to help improve these scores and rankings for bloggers, if they continue to focus on writing excellent high quality content, day in and day out, then the high scores and rankings will just naturally come.