A website's importance

White Collars
In daily life, we value information partially based on the 'authority' of the messenger. In other words: if something is brought by Reuters Press, we value it more than when we hear it from a 15 year old who doesn't even know how to spell correctly. If your doctor tells you to do this or that, you are more prone to listen then when the old lady at the supermarket does so. Although there's cases when this strategy doesn't work out too well, it is normally quite an effective strategy. With so much information coming at us, we simply have to use these rules-of-thumb.

Websites
In the world wide web, these notions of 'authority' are important as well, in many ways. Some users may have the tendency to easily believe whatever is written on the web (which can be a problem all by itself!), others may be more critical, taking into account the source into account when evaluating the relevance of information. Search indexers help out here a lot by trying to sort information based on the 'authority' of the source. Webmasters try and make use of this of course, but that's not what this post is about.

Estimate it yourself
This post is about wanting to get a quick estimate of a site's reputation for yourself, when your existing knowledge leaves you clueless. This can be for various reasons. Perhaps you found information and want to know how trustworthy it is. Perhaps you want to know which sites could be most effective to partner with, to buy ads on, etcetera.

The site itself
A site itself can give a good first impression. Is it a blog? How lang has it been around? How long since the last post or your post of interest was submitted? Other clues you may get from the number of followers, the number of comments, the type of comments and maybe even the site's layout (be careful!).

Google PageRank
Google's PageRank is an indication of a page's importance, valued by its connectedness based on links to that page from elsewhere, especially from pages with high PageRanks themselves. This helps (it is not the only factor!) Google to sort search results, but by itself it can be informative as well! An individual rank is calculated for each page. This can be useful if you want data from a single page. If your interest concerns a whole site, you could lookup the PageRank for the site's homepage, but this ignores all links from outside that link to a any other page within the site.

Alexa Rating
The Alexa rating is based on a lot of user's actual browsing data, collected by a toolbar. Probably, the users that have the toolbar are not a perfect representation of the whole population of internet users. This may influence the results a little. Alexa Rankings are three months averages, so they change only gradually. In contrast to Google's PageRank, the Alexa rating is based on entire sites. Alexa also provides other statistics than rankings, by the way. Top 3 Alexa rankings: Google, Facenbook, YouTube. My blog: above 23.000.000. This guy's website: less than 2.000.

How to get it?
How to get the PageRank for a website? You could use Google's Toolbar, or if you're using Chrome browser (ironically) use PageRank Status from chromefans.org. The latter also gives you Alexa ratings. These are in any case accessible via alexa.com.