Something very strange is happening with Google and/or the PageRank prediction tool at iWebTool.com, because apparently it’s not finding enough backlinks to Beyond the Rhetoric to predict my PageRank (which — to my knowledge — is currently sitting at PR5). And it’s not just me, it’s happening to fake Stephen Fung and London Drugs Employee of the Month Ed Lau too. And what’s more, John Chow is getting bitch slapped with a PageRank demotion (for johnchow.com but not for www.johnchow.com).

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The iWebTool, er, tool says “to predict your PageRank, you need a minimum of 100 backlinks.” So investigating further, when I went and put “link:btr.michaelkwan.com” into Google (indicating how many pages on the Internet are linking back to my blog), it gave back 139 results. On a side note, Technorati found 752 backlinks.

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When I did the same for ededition.com and stephenfung.net, it returned ZERO results. I quickly found out that by plunking in the “www” made a world of difference, with both blogs receiving much, much more than 100 backlinks. What is going on here? Maybe it’s time for me to use a different PageRank prediction tool.