WordPress PageRank Widget Plugin

There are a number of PageRank plugins for WordPress, but it seems that all of them involve manually editing the template to incorporate them. With the lack of a better option, I took it upon myself to develop a WordPress plugin to display PageRank in a widget. And thus, the PageRank Widget for WordPress was born.

The options are very simple, as there is only one. You can display your PageRank either at a top-level (http://www.yourdomain.com) or display it at a page level (http://www.yourdomain.com/the-page-level). By default, the PageRank will be displayed at the page level.

Installation is very simple:

• Download the PageRank Widget plugin
• Extract the contents to your plugin directory
• Activate the plugin
• Navigate to Appearance > Widgets
• Add the PageRank Widget
• Select the display option (Individual Pages or Top-Level)
• Save Changes

I like the option of being able to display PageRank with a standalone widget. It makes it very simple to use and does not involve having to edit any HTML code or load images/JavaScript from another website. Try it out, and feel free to make any suggestions as to how I might be able to improve it.

Update (01/06/2009): Per a user request, I’ve also added a feature to display the pagerank within a page/post. To use it, place the following comment where you wish for it to appear within the page:

<!--pagerank-->

Update (02/24/2009): I noticed today that the widget was causing some errors on my page. There was increased traffic on my site, so I made some updates to the plugin so that the PageRank requests are only made once a day. PageRank really does not change probably more than once a month anyway, so this should not present any problems.

Update (05/09/2009): I broke the plugin a few days ago, and it is now fixed. Version 0.60 has many bugfixes and now the PageRanks are cached so that we do not upset Google for making excessive requests.

Earlier I was avoiding this by using http://www.gmodules.com/ig/proxy?url= as a cache because Google seemed to have no problems when requests were made from the gmodules server. However, it seems Google has plugged that hole and they now detect requests from gmodules.com as automated requests as they would any other server. Now the requests have to be made directly by the website, so caching the PageRanks was necessary for this to happen.