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With no Toolbar updates for the last 97 days (as Sept 27th) attention has been turning to the PageRank (PR) displayed in the Google Directory that was updated on Aug the 10th.  This post looks at the Directory PageRank Scale and how it compares to the Toolbar PageRank Scale.  This short primer will get you up to speed on how these 2 different scales relate to each other and to Real PageRank.

The toolbar PR has 11 different positions, PR0 to PR10 and is usually referred to as a scale of 10 (1-10).  With the Google toolbar installed and the PageRank display enabled in the toolbar options you can view the value of the PageRank of the web page you are viewing.  Just do a mouse over on the green bar and a tooltip will pop up and tell you what the PR value is. 

Mouse over this clip from the Google toolbar.

The Google directory has 9 different positions. The first, if it can be called a position, uses cleardot.gif in the source and is blank, there is no bar.  There isn’t even an outline like on the toolbar.  Next there are 8 positions using the neg.gif and pos.gif to form a green bar of different lengths.  There is no mouse over for the directory green bar and the only way you can see the scale values I am discussing here is by looking at the source and wading though the html code.

These 8 positions are 5/35, 11/29, 16/24, 22/18, 27/13, 38/2 and 44/0 (pos.gif/neg.gif).  The 44/0 is only given to Gogle domain sites. It is interesting to note that other Google PR10 pages in the directory are 38/2’s, see Froggle in the Directory as an example.

The graphic below compares the directory and toolbar scale. The relationship between the two is the same as Chris Raimondi’s scale. For further information on Raimondi’s position and research see The Handy Dandy Google PageRank Figurin’ Guide. The first of the 9 different values for the directory scale is cleardot.gif. This is reflected in the scale below as a 0. The other 8 positions discussed above are listed below using the pixel wide of the pos.gif. (This image is not a copy from Raimondi’s site.)

There are at least 2 different positions held concerning the toolbar and directory scales.  Some feel that PR0 in the toolbar is not part of the toolbar scale.  That leaves 10 positions in the toolbar scale. Those that hold that position usually hold that the directory scale is a scale of 7 and that the cleardot.gif or blank is not part of the scale.

Bob Wakfer chart in his Google PageRank & How to Get It (2004) article shows his view on the range of the real PR covered by the toolbar scale.  He doesn’t give a value to PR0.  But Markus Sobek in his article A Survey of Google’s PageRank (2002) gives a lower range of real PR to PR0. As Google is tight lipped on all this it is not uncommon for there to be more than one position that makes sense.

What I really wanted to establish clearly in this post is that the scales between the toolbar and the directory are different.  Also to point out that the directory and the toolbar PR are only a scale that represents the value of real or actual PageRank. 

The full range of actual or real PageRank is covered by the toolbars scale of 10 (or 11 depending on your position). The directories scale of 7 (or 8 depending on your position) also covers the full range of real Pagerank. But both the toolbar and the directory visible PageRank is just a number or graphic representation of the Real PageRank.

Further the both scales are logarithmic. This means that as you move up the scale the range of real PageRank that each toolbar value contains increases.
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Related link: See my other articles on PageRank at SEO Company