My fellow member of “My Way, The Entrepreneur Network”, Dharmesh Shah, has some useful thoughts on the importance of Google’s PageRank for Web 2.0 startups:

If you’re running a web-based startup that in any way depends on web traffic and high volume user acquisition, you need to be tracking your Google PageRank. It’s ugly, coarse and infrequently updated – but it’s important. All things being equal, a startup with a higher PageRank is worth more than one with a lower one.

I could agree more. Last night, I was at the Advisory Board/Shareholder’s Meeting for one of my investments, and the management team had determined that they were getting about 1.5 million pageviews per month directly from from search engines!

To find out your PageRank, I use a nifty little site that a friend of mine created called PageRankr (http://www.pagerankr.com/). I can put in a domain name and get back the PageRank, Alexa Rank, number of indexed pages, and number of incoming links. If you’re trying to sell your site, it also includes a little widget you can use to display your PageRank on your site.

PageRankr is one of those sites that is clearly a feature, not a product, but since it’s so cheap to run Web sites these days, I’ll bet the proprietor is still making some beer money. As I often say, thank goodness for the Internet!