Google’s “Page Rank” (”PR”) isn’t as useful as it used to be as a measure of a website’s popularity. PR is supposed to measure, amongst other things, how many high quality inbound links there are coming to a site (i.e. how many sites have a link to a particular website).

But, in recent years, the declared PR of a site is not the current PR, but the Google evaluation made a few months ago.

Nevertheless, PR still has some relevance. Many people use the Google Toolbar to instantly asses the PR of any site they visit. What they don’t often realise is that different Google DataCenters can produce different PR readings. Google has multiple databases of sites, which are only synchronised once in a while.

One f’ree online service which tries to overcome this multiple DataCenter problem lets you enter a domain name (that’s the web address without the http://www bit) and it then shows you the results from five of Google’s DataCenters. You can try out this service here:

http://www.IanSays.com/PRChecker

Make of it what you will, but if you really want to know what drives “PR”, get the truth from Google:

http://www.IanSays.com/CooCoo

Yes, the mega corporation does have a sense of humour