There seems to be a new interesting service called Website Grader which generates a report or “grade” based on certain established Web “criteria.” Although it is similar to a few other services that attempt to gauge website value, this one doesn’t put any dollar value to the result.
So I tested my blog for fun, and got a grade of 91. Which isn’t too shabby I suppose. It basically means being better than 91% of websites out there. Except for the fact that my PageRank has become an undefined value. This might have been due to placing my link in
the footer of a couple of my sites, although I’m really not sure about that.
On one hand, I am concerned about my PageRank status, but on the other hand, is it worth losing sleep over? I still believe PageRank is important, although day by day, it is becoming less clear on what the true value of PageRank is about.
This recent update around the end of February has resulted in even more sites dropping in PageRank. And less hysterics this time around, unlike before. With more frequent updates (which appears to be monthly now), is Google subtly trying to send a message that PageRank is “not very important?” It seems to me, many webmasters don’t bother about PageRank any more since last year’s smackdown.
Apart from my PageRank, I didn’t do well in my metadata tags. In fact, the report told me I had no metadata description and keywords! Something for me to look into, although strangely, I don’t think I was adversely affected by having no metadata description all this while. For one, Google has long phased out factoring metadata in its algorithm since years ago, and only less advanced search engines continue using meta tags.
At the moment, the Website Grader tool uses a number of criteria, including metadata, heading summary, interior page analysis, off/on page SEO, indexed pages, traffic rank, and Technorati rank.
It is important to recognize that if you have a blog, you should consider it as a work in progress, and not get too excited (or discouraged) by any auto generated reports. If you think of your blog as an online channel like I do, getting a good report or a lousy one on a free website reporting tool like this should be treated as nothing more than novel amusement, and a reminder that a blog is forever a work in progress.
As they say, there’s always – room for improvement.