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).
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.
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.
The reason no links are returned in Google for the non-www versions of those sites is because they have redirects in place so Google sees only the www. version.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the tool but no one should use the link: search in Google. They don’t offer any numbers that are even close to accurate. The numbers provided in Webmaster Central are more accurate but you can only find those for your own site. You’d be better off using the Site Explorer on Yahoo to find link data.
I don’t think anyone has ever linked to me without a www. I have 978 with it, though. 🙂
I’ve noticed this before. My site still has 0 backlinks according to iwebtools
So many people complain about how unrealistic iwebtool is with their PR predictions. BloggingTips.com is running a good test to see if it’s actually a viable source. We will see at the next update!
This has happened to me in the past. But it is not simply about the www and the non www links but also there exists a certain problem with the tool sometimes.. This causes insufficient backlinks to be displayed even when there are quite some.
I have heard others complaining about this as well. It will be interesting to see what happens here…
Haha, when I did the test it said my site was going to go from a PR0 to a PR6 (on par with John Chow). So we’ll see…
Ignore it. It says I’m PR4 sometimes, then PR6 sometimes and only ever comes out at 17,000 backlinks when I have over 100,000. 🙂
It’s around the corner lets all just wait and see.
ok…it was me. i broke it. sorry everyone…
I just found that tool too and it said at first I had 300-something backlinks, but it only worked one time. Now every time I use it, it says 0 backlinks and 0 predicted pagerank. And the link inside google analytics has never worked for me to show me my links. I’m not sure what’s wrong.
By the way, I just subscribed to you feed. Thanks.
i have discovered that for sometime, and since then i did not really care much who link to who, but just carried on posting and posting..
This PR prediction tool seems to work:
http://nextpr.info