In a move that may further thrill the professionals working in SEO and SEM areas, Yahoo has quitely rolled out something very similar to the famous Google PageRank. This is a system that allows Yahoo to calculate the rank of any Web site by leveraging the browsing habits when using the new Yahoo!'s Web Rank Toolbar. The ranking mechanism places any individual Web site on a popularity scale going from 1 to 10 based on the number of links pointing to that site and other factors Yahoo takes into account. For those who wish not to install the new Yahoo Web Rank Toolbar, or that do not have MSIE installed as their default browser, Yahoo Web Rank data can also be accessed by by going to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/
"Yahoo Web Rank is only in Beta release, which means Yahoo is still experimenting with it and modifications in the way it works are possible, until the final version is released sometime in the next few weeks. To help determine a site's Web Rank™ value, Yahoo's Companion Toolbar collects anonymous URL data about sites visited by toolbar users who have enabled the Web Rank™ feature and then sends that information back to Yahoo. The new Yahoo's new Web Rank toolbar algorithm will also help alert Yahoo's Slurp (Yahoo's search crawler), to the existence of a particular website or Web page, and direct its spider to visit that website or Web page for inclusion in its search index."