How do pagerank checking services work?

Question

How do pagerank checking services work?

Answer 1

There's a PHP script here which should return the pagerank for you http://www.pagerankcode.com/download-script.html

Answer 2

Almost all those services are hitting the same service that the Google Toolbar uses. However, people at Google have said over and over not to look at PageRank, and that it's such a small portion of ranking.

That said, you can grab someone's (open source) SEO toolbar (just search for it) and open up the javascript to see how they're doing it.

Answer 3

Most services just copy what the Google tool bar shows. But pagerank is usually not the important thing, the important thing is to get quality backlinks with relevant anchor text.

Answer 4

Nick is right - Google Page Rank is really not what you should be looking for. In fact, it might be going away. Instead, I would look at SEOmoz.org's metrics from their SEO toolbar. They use metrics called Page Authority (the general power of the site out of 100 - most comparable to Page Rank * 10), mozRank (how popular a site is, i.e. how many links it has and how good those links are), and mozTrust (how trustworthy the site is considered. For example, if a site is in a "bad neighborhood" and is linking to/linked to by a lot of spammy sites, it would have a low mozTrust). MozRank and mozTrust are out of 10.

Answer 5

The script at http://www.pagerankcode.com/download-script.html is not working on most wide known hosting providers, while it will run perfectly if you install a small Apache server on your own PC (XAMPP and similar).

I think the only way is to wait until Google releases a web service API capable of performing such a rank (incredibly there are APIs to query almost every Google service, except this PageRank function).