The reason behind this is the recent PageRank (PR in short)update by Google. My twitter profile acquired a PageRank of 4 (on a 10 point scale), in the PageRank update of 30th October 2009. This time, the PR update came amidst a lot of  conjectures on various webmaster discussion forums that the PR system is discontinued by Google.

Vinay Swastik's Twitter profile gets a Google PageRank-4

I hope that this blog of mine would also get a PR in the next update. It has been 15 days only since I registered the vinayswastik.com domain, so I wasn’t expecting PR so early on this domain.

What is PageRank?

There is a ranking system used by Google to rank the web pages based on their relative popularity on web. This is known as PageRank. This was originally started as a project at Stanford University. Google acquired it as trademark in 2005, though the patent still resides with Stanford.

According to the definition given by Stanford -

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting (on a 10 or 100 point scale) to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents (or simply, a web page) , such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

In PageRank, more the number better is the rank, e.g. PageRank 8/10 is better than PageRank 2/10

The actual calculations of PR system are pretty complex (couldn’t have expected any better by Stanford) and can be found on Wikipedia.

The homepage of Google.com stands at PR-10, Official website of Indian Government also holds PR-10, twitter homepage has been assigned as PR-9. The popularity of a web page is reflected in it’s PageRank.

Hopefully, I’ll continue to improve my PageRank and keep on climbing to higher PR.