Before I start discussing the topic I must tell you that before I started this blog I never bothered to look at PageRanks of web sites. Now, every time I go to a new web site or blog, I find myself checking out the PageRank.

Till today I believed that the PageRank equates to the popularity of a page or a website, meaning that the higher the PageRank, the higher the popularity. Of course, Google does not say so explicitly. Google defines PageRank as the importance of a page. But what does importance mean? Would it not be safe to assume that a web site with a higher importance should have a higher popularity too? It seems not.

Today when I visited Download.com, I saw that the PageRank of the site was 10/10. Now, not very many sites have that kind of PageRank. In fact, the only other web site that I can recall, with a PageRank of 10, is Microsoft.com. Just out of curiosity I checked the PageRank of Yahoo, the most popular and the most visited web site in the world. It showed a PageRank of 9 !

Here is a list of the 10 most popular web sites according to Alexa. This list is limited to only English language sites. I have checked the PageRank for each of the sites and put it alongside.

1. Yahoo! - 9/10
   
2. Microsoft Network (MSN) - 0/10 (Something wrong?)
   
3. Google - 8/10
   
4. YouTube - 8/10
   
5. Myspace - 8/10
   
6. Windows Live - 8/10
7. Orkut.com - 8/10
   
8. Microsoft Corporation - 10/10
   
9. Megaupload - 6/10
10. Blogger.com - At the homepage it says No PageRank information available

Download.com is ranked 54th in Alexa.

Of course, the Traffic ranking by Alexa is not the most accurate as it only gets the information from users who use Alexa toolbar. Nevertheless, Alexa is still widely considered as a good indicator when it comes to web site popularity.

I really don’t know what to make of it. I can only presume that the PageRank may not be a true indication of the popularity of a Web site. Maybe I should not worry about this blog having a PageRank of 0 afterall.(as on the date of writing this post).

I would really appreciate if someone could throw more light on this.

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