New Page Rank for a New Year

Page Rank is the cornerstone of Google's search engine algorithm.  Every website that Google indexes is assigned a Page Rank, which is what Google believes the "importance" of that site is on a 0-10 scale.  The way that Google discerns the importance of a page is based on the legitimacy of other websites linking to your site.

The more legitimate the sites and the more in number that link to you, the higher your page rank will be. The algorithm believes that if you're worthy of earning links from other trustworthy sites, then you too are a reliable site worthy of a good page rank.

Google does not divulge the specific details of the algorithm or how frequently it is updated.  From searching the blogosphere it looks like the last Page Rank update was September 2008...until today.  From what I can tell, it looks like Page Rank was updated today as our site and personal blogs pretty much all had a new rank.  New Media Campaigns is now a Page Rank 6, which we're very excited about.

A 6 is a pretty powerful PR and will give us more authority when linking to pages within our own site with targeted keyword phrases and will also let us pass along more PR juice to other sites that we link to.  Page Rank takes awhile to build up, and I attribute our recent jump to our increased blogging frequency, press related to votethesite.com (now a 4), and subscription to some new directories such as Yahoo!.

Kudos to Katy Barrilleaux for tweeting that she noticed a Page Rank change this morning, which led me to investigate it on my own.

Happy New Year to everyone!