No, I have not been completely true to my intentions. Whenever I get the overwhelming urge to check the Page Rank on a webpage I turn it on for a split second and then turn it off again, as if by having it up for less time lessens the severity of the breach in my willpower.

However, I am pretty good about it. I will occasionally check to see the status of an important page within one of my websites. Or I will bring it up to check a website I might consider buying. I figure it would be almost malpractice not to look at the page rank in that case.

Even so, from everything I hear, the page rank bar is practically meaningless, and the Google algorithm actually looks at other factors. I don’t know. All I can say is despite my occasional lapses, I have been far happier working on the web since I stopped worrying about page rank.

 The truth is, several times I have been tempted to put it back on, if only for a few minutes, just to check the page rank of a particular page. I sometimes will buy a domain, and for this purpose it is nice to know the page rank. But most of my domain shopping is just window shopping, so I have resisted the temptation.

Have I really missed the page rank tool? A confession – Once I did look up the page rank of a particular website with an online verification tool that I happened to have bookmarked. Other than this one little back-slide, I truly have not missed it, and my feelings of liberation go on unabated. 

But before I could go down that dark path of S-ch Eng-ne Opt-ization (dirty words to some). I said to myself, wait a darn minute! Should I really be doing anything? My stats had not discernibly changed on the website. That is really the bottom line, is it not? I decided that the real problem here was not my website, which is just as useful today as it was yesterday. It was the whole page rank thing which is always driving these panics. I am certain that it has people performing all kinds of gyrations on their websites just to get that little green bar to extend a fraction (and I do mean fraction) of an inch longer. 

Well, I made a rash move for a web-publisher. I went in my tool bar and disabled the Page Rank display button. I had been thinking for a long time about doing this, but I did not want to give up some of the other useful features of the bar. I like having a search box always ready on my browser, and I like the spell checker that checks my text in forms. Yet, I did not have to give these up. I merely clicked the “Settings” button on the right side of the toolbar, clicked on “options”, and the ”more” tab, and then unchecked the page rank button under the ”Even More Buttons” header.

I am feeling a bit giddy about the whole thing. Like most rash moves, I may find myself regretting it. I can even see myself cheating and going in and turning on the button occasionally, “just to see”. But for now, I plan to relax and work on some projects without worrying about how they will rank.