When our ‘PR and new media’ class began on 31 January, I knew I would have to allow a good three months for our student bloggers to find their feet and have some chance of achieving wider recognition. What I didn’t know was how accurate my prediction would be. (Google indexing has been getting even quicker, but PageRank has become a cruder measure according to commentators). Yesterday, 30 April, Google registered some of these blogs (scroll to end) with a PageRank of 3/10. Only 30%? That’s poor in university assessment terms, but not bad for novice bloggers.
PageRank may not be recalculated for another three months by which time I fear that most of these blogs will be untended. But here’s another prediction: a few will keep going, and may creep up to 4/10 or 5/10 (this blog’s modest PageRank). The scale is logarithmic so each step up the scale requires something like a doubling of inbound links.
Does any of this matter? Well, I’m assessing the blogs in another two weeks and I’ve decided to use a mix of hard and soft measures. PageRank is just one of these ‘hard’ measures; numbers of posts, numbers of comments, inbound and outbound links are others.
More important, student blogs are living CVs (resumes). If you want to provide PR or marketing on a commercial basis, then practise promoting and protecting your personal brand first. We know employers are searching.
PR Studies 
Indeed, 3/10 is not bad at all when you consider the Google home page is 8/10. Well done to you students, I say. Glad you are not using Technorati though, I find it misses one in five links.
I think 3/10 is a success for us, because as you mentioned we started to run blogs 3 months ago, every day we are gaining skills and learning new things. Aim is to see 5/7 or 6/10 why not 🙂
I tottaly agree that they are living resume’s. I already put it on my CV and I started to collect its fruits.
Ya mr. Bailey, to be honest, Thank You to introduce Blog to me. At the beginning I did not know anything about blog, but after I make my own blog, I felt this is quite useful, and it makes me want to use more about social networking such as blog, multiply, facebook, etc.
Hi Richard,
I was Delighted with the 3/10 ranking considering i am only a ‘newbie’ to this blogging business.
I was getting worried as i had forgotten that it took some time for them to be compiled and i thought all the efforts i had made to get the ranking were just not working!!