Coconut Headphones

Google’s Toolbar PageRank, the value that you can obtain by surfing websites while the Google Toolbar is installed, has been available via a number of websites for years, ever since someone figured out how to reverse engineer the protocol that the Toolbar uses to talk to Google’s datacenters to obtain the value. Google appears to have been fairly tolerant of tools that obtain this data over the years (otherwise many of them would have been banned, or they would have changed the protocol frequently, etc.). This tolerance sometimes makes me suspect that Toolbar PageRank is a bit of a purposeful red herring, and ranking is perhaps all about anchor text instead, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The most popular tool for checking individual PageRank values is probably www.prchecker.info, and there are various Firefox plug-ins that do the same thing so you can get the values without installing the Google Toolbar, but sometimes for prioritizing linking efforts it is helpful to be able to pull Google Toolbar PageRank for hundreds or even thousands of URLs at one time.

Fortunately, a number of websites allow you to enter 25 or 100 URLs and will then grab the info for you.  Many of them seem to be based on this PHP script available for purchase.

A 25-URL version can be seen operational here, and you can find others by searching on [bulk pagerank scriptalicious]:

Multiple PageRank Checker Demo

A couple of 100-URL versions are available here (in some cases it looks like people bought the script and upped the limit, in others perhaps it’s a different script.  The Certified Easy one looks like it includes the source code for its script):

PageRankLookup
Bulk PageRank
Certified Easy Bulk PageRank Checker

Here’s a 150-URL version:

GoLink Multiple PageRank Checker

If Google ever puts the hammer down on these services though, there’s a really simple free tool that accepts .CSV files as its input, outputs .CSV files, and can handle thousands of requests.

This nifty tool is called PaRaMeter (presumably short for PageRankMeter), and works fine as long as you don’t push your luck. It runs off of your own machine and IP address, and I would imagine you risk getting banned by Google if you use it. Somewhere north of 1000-1200 requests, or a few sessions with 1000 requests or so each within a few minutes of each other, is sufficient to cause only “N/A” results to come back. For this reason, PaRaMeter has built-in proxy support as well.   However, I’m not a fan of open proxies, so I don’t recommend them; who knows what other kinds of traffic are being passed along through those servers with your own (!) – open proxies have “bad idea” written all over them in my opinion.

This tool has some interesting bells and whistles, including the ability to select specific Google Datacenters – presumably useful if you’d like to confirm that a “Google Dance” is going on.  Another great feature is, it can actually spider a specified website to identify all of its pages, and then get all the Toolbar PageRank values.  Its spidering feature isn’t as full-featured as tools like Xenu Link Sleuth but it appears to actually work reasonably well.

Incredibly, it’s available via free download, presumably to get some attention on CleverStat’s other products.  Enjoy!