First things first.

As part of my effort to straighten up TheLocoMono Website and its’ sub-domain, I began to do some research on the Internet to see what the “pros” have to say about Google PageRank. At first, I went over to DoshDosh who had An Informative Guide to Google PageRank: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know which was really just a fancy title for a summary of an article posted at Search Engine Land called What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters. Note that this article was published in April 2007 so by Internet standards, it is pretty outdated but I always look for every little bit of information that counts.

The first thing that caught my eye was this explanation what the Google PageRank (or commonly referred to as PR) is this particular statement about what PR does for searchers.

You can’t see PageRank when you search …, but behind the scenes, it helps in part to decide if a page will show up in the top search results or not.

So if you are using Google Toolbar on your web browser, there should be a Settings icon on the right where you can select from Options to pull up the Google Toolbar Option screen. There should be a More tab which you can click on.

In the configure more buttons and option screen, you will see a box for PageRank and Page Info. This is where you have the option to see the PR for the sites you are visiting or not to determine the popularity of the particular page within that site. For example, the homepage may have a higher PR than an error page.

Even though I had the latest Firefox browser, I did not have the Google Toolbar installed so I went ahead and installed the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Now The Question of The Day

How much of a factor does having a PageRank button on your Google Toolbar help decide if the page will show up in the top search results or not?

What I am asking here is whether having the PageRank and Page Info box checked or not means that Google can use the data from the Google Toolbar to help determine the importance of the page for search results. The purpose of this question is to find out whether I should encourage my visitors to install the Google Toolbar and check the PageRank box since you guys like to come back here often to read what I have to write about.