This one has been making the rounds all week so it deserves a mention here. A couple of products have cropped up claiming to actively predict a websites future PR - before the update. Ludicrous? Isn't that like the holy grail of SEO? Good grief.

As it turns out iWEBTOOL does not predect pagerank. Sean has a great article on iWEBTOOL and really pulls their pants down on his blog.

The company has been debunked in several threads on the usual SEO forums, but basically it is returning completely useless data unrelated to Pagerank whatsoever. Heres a quote from the excellent article linked above:

"It is using data which has nothing to do with PageRank to calculate your future PageRank. It is the equivalent of me wanting to find out how many apples will grow on my apple tree this year by going to count sheep in a field... Utterly pointless.

If it was easy or even possible to predict a websites future PageRank, then the system would quickly collapse as SEO companies discover how it works and exploit it. We would see websites shoot up the rankings and the whole Google system would be a shambles. There is a reason Googles algorithms are kept a secret. At this point, the only way to find out your websites future PageRank is to sit tight and wait for their next update!"

I guess the good side of this latest snake oil stuff is it gets us all talking about reverse engineering Googles Pagerank algo. I know I am working on it full time. Although my work has so far been limited to the coffee table and bong-hits phase, I am assured VC money is on the way. All joking aside it sure is funny reading all the fuss about PR rankings while everyone sweats out the wait. I mean - it is what it is - and it's seriously just not all that important.

But for those who care, or if you are developing or just messing around with the Google API, you can obtain live PR scores fairly easily. Here is how real live Pagerank is calculated:

URL_1:32:http://www.profitpapers.com/
Title_1:19: ProfitPapers | Marketing Software Reviews, SEO
Tools, Articles, and Industry Buzz
Rank_1:1:4
CrawlDate_3:16:7 feb 2006
Summary_1:169: The ProfitPapers is my best effort to categorize [...]tools or provided guides. ...
Link_1:0:
CacheSize_1:2:81k
Related_1:0:

The important part of all this is: Rank_1:1:4, which shows I have a PageRank of 4. You can see how most of the well known PR tools are getting that data. Cool.

When running RustyBrick's tool I get the following dreary result:

Results: Your current Google PageRank is 4. Based on our calculations, we predict your future PageRank after the next Google update will be 4, an increase of 6.67%.

I have compiled a list of all of these tools on my latest ProfitPapers article Predicting Pagerank.