One of the LinkedIn groups was discussing how you can check your *Google rank for your LinkedIn profile. Why were we checking our ranking? Because the person posting the original message had a theory that we would all be at the same rank for our profiles at LinkedIn. It was soon found that wasn’t the case, although the majority at the discussion seemed to have a ranking of 3, there were some with 2 and 4 as well.
I hadn’t thought to do that before and so thought I’d play the game too.
My LinkedIn profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/kathiethomas and the page rank tool is at http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php for those who are interested.
A bit of fun really, but what does it all mean? Perhaps it’s a measure of connectivity, activity and something else? Maybe the people I’m connected to who are active? (See below for definition of Page Rank)
I met someone at church recently – fairly new to our church. He asked me if I was Kathie and said he knew me through LinkedIn and that I was quite active there. First time really that I’ve met someone face-to-face who knows me through LinkedIn. Social media and business tools on the web are certainly changing how we connect with people and get to know them. It also means it’s important that we are on show online as we intend for people to know us offline too. There’s no anonymity for those who are active online these days, especially when your audience is local and nearby too.
*What does page rank mean? (From Wikipedia)
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google web search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.
The value of incoming links is colloquially referred to as “Google juice”, “link juice” or “Pagerank juice”.
By the way – if you want to connect with me, please do. But make sure you explain in the invitation where you found me and your interest in connecting. I like to learn about what people are thinking when they wish to connect. It’s a great way to open the doors of communication! And when you invite others to connect, you’ll find you will get a better response when you explain your interest in connecting.
Lyn Prowse-Bishop says
Nice article Kathie. I wonder sometimes how “accurate” these things are. LinkedIn is the one space I am LEAST active in, yet I still have a Google Page Rank there of 4/10.
Kathie Thomas says
All I know is that trying other page rank tools, the same thing comes up, so they must be using the same algorithms. I think perhaps incoming links might have something to do with it too, in relation to how many others you’re connected to and how many they are as well. That’s my theory, anyway.