Today is one of those days when I feel like throwing up my hands in despair, banging my head on a desk and finding a new career in the fast food industry.

Can someone please explain to me why my husband’s blog has a PageRank of 5? I’ve checked it 15 different ways, and every time it comes back the same. He wrote four posts in March 2007 and hasn’t touched the blog since. It has a grand total of 55 inbound links, according to Yahoo! Site Explorer, and 52 of those come from being listed on two blogrolls (including mine).

Meanwhile, I’ve been slogging away at my company’s new website for almost a year now, and I’ve been stuck at a PageRank of 3 the entire time. I’m starting to wonder if PageRank is real, or if Google spits out a random number every three months just to torture us. Are hundreds of engineers in Mountain View snickering as we speak?

I’ve been re-reading Danny Sullivan’s detailed explanation of PageRank to see if perhaps I missed something. I’ve also re-read Google’s explanation as well. But everything I’m reading contradicts what’s happening here.

If PageRank truly interprets links as votes, then how does a personal blog with so few votes — votes of mediocre quality, mind you — get such a high PageRank?

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