Pagerank Checkup Tools fail across the board

All those nifty Pagerank Checking Scripts that are offered on literally hundreds of websites are failing to display any score at the moment. It does not matter which website is entered in the scripts all return a PR N/A on all datacenters which leads to the question of why this is currently happening.

I can think of three possibilities right now. First, Google changed something in their API which had the result that all of those scripts are failing right now. Another possibility would be that Google has some internal problems and can’t answer the scripts requests right at the moment.

The third possibility would be that Google decided to cut access to its datacenters to all Pagerank checking scripts by disallowing that this data is being pulled from them.

Whatever it is it is still on going and it surely will take some time until the World receives an official answer from Google.

Update:

It seems that some scripts are still working. One of them is Oyoy as confirmed by Andy Beard

Use Google Trends to your advantage

I’m sometimes in doubt about the correct keyword that I have to use in an article. This happened for instance in the past when I was writing about hard drives, or hard disks. I was not sure if I should use hard drives or hard disks in the article. Using both in the same article was out of question so I had to make a decision.

Instead of rolling some dices I decided to use Google Trends to take a look at the search volume for both terms and pick the term that would have a higher search volume. The higher search volume might not always be the best pick because it means usually that the competition is also using that term in favor of a lesser searched one.

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There are several commercial services that add a so called heatmap to your website. This map is build by analyzing all clicks that visitors make on your website. If you analyze the hotspots over a certain period of time you will probably be able to optimize ad and content placement on your website.

ClickHeat is the first heatmap that is free of charge, at least the first that I heard of. Your server needs to support PHP (5) and the graphic library GD to be able to run the script. Once it is installed you can take a look at certain pages, group pages, a set data, a data range and how different browsers performed.

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