Google PageRank makes no sense to me!
A very good friend of mine recently came to me with a grief after sudden drop of her personal blog on Cricket. It made me realize that people still give so much importance to Google PageRank and know so little about it & its relation with search engine rankings. This is the story behind the topic of today’s post on the so called importance of PageRank where I would like to share my personal views on why you should or should not worry about it.
What exactly is Google PageRank?
In Google’s own words :
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
So PageRank is definitely not the rank where your website will appear on the search engines. Is is definitely not dependent on what content do you have on your web page. It is, IMHO, just a yardstick by which one can gauge the popularity of their web pages on the web. To put it simply,
- The more people put your link on their web page, the higher you get your PageRank.
- The higher is the PageRank of the pages that have linked to your web page, the higher is the PageRank your web page receives.
Again, please keep in mind that Google PageRank DOES NOT determine how many visitors your website are getting or will get.
A funny animation about people's obsession with PageRank. Courtesy Blaugh.com
Are you one of those open your website in (say) firefox every day to just find your PageRank? If yes, stop doing that now because you won’t see it getting changed every day, not even weeks. But yes, thrice a year is acceptable. Because this is the approximate number of times that Google will update it. Here are the confirmed dates of when it was done in previous 2 years – just FYI
- 30 October 2009
- 28 May 2009
- 1 April 2009
- 31 December 2008
- 27 September 2008
- 29 April 2008
- 9 January 2008
Here is the official statement by one of the Google’s employee in their official discussion board
“We have been telling people for a long time that they shouldnt focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think its the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”
More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here.
In a nutshell, the toolbar PR is fun, it’s interesting to compare greenness with friends, but it’s of little practical value in the world of SEO. If you liked reading this article on the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed now!
1. Then, why does Google run a PageRank? Why don’t they just depricate it. How does PageRank linking schema put Amazon.com on a equal footing with Joe’s Junk Shoppe dot com? Duh, I mean, do the math … how many people know Amazon versus Joe’s Junk? So the purpose of the Google PageRank is …. !?!
2. And … why do people link to “other” web sites to such an extreme in the first place?
Google.com has a PR of 10 and an Alexa of 1. Duh. Surprised? And that tells us …. what!?!
Are we just being kept busy by Google, by ourselves, or are we actually highly productive intelligent beings!?! (Don’t answer, I already know the answer.)
Take the LIBRARY SEARCH ENGINE, the GREATEST SEARCH ENGINE ON EARTH.
Google’s Book doesn’t rank any higher then MY Book.
WHAT!?! Imagine that!
MY Book is as easy to find as is Google’s regardless of where the book(s) are on the shelves.
WHOA! This CANT BE!?! Wutta MAR-VEL-OUS search engine concept!
From my experience your article is very accurate with regard to the significance of Page Rank. I would like to add however that PR does have some value towards Search Engine Results Placement (SERP).
You see search engines place your search listing based on a score derived from your SEO efforts for any given search word or phrase. What this means is that if someone is looking for “hat racks” and your site is SEO’d for “hat racks” you will get a specific score based on the quality of your SEO for that term, let’s say your score is 4.78. Now there could be other sites that sell “hat racks” and they too could have a score of 4.78 for the term. So when there is a tie in search scores, which site gets placed highest in the SERP? This is where a good PR comes in handy. The site with the highest PR gets placed higher than those sites with lower PR.
While it is true PR has little to do with SERP of your site it is something that should not be ignored. PR alone is not the factor that will get you front page exposure; however, it does provide a measure of the value of your website. The higher you’re PR the more valuable the site is in terms of actual sale value and increased traffic/sales.
Best Regards
Woody
I must admit I am one of those that in the past had a fixation on page rank.
Not any more I have seen many websites hit the top 10 in google after only a few days.
Its good to know the Google Page Rank does not matter, however a lot of people do go by it!
Google PageRank is only a measure for advertisers using linking form your page to their page. It does only make sence in the way you have incoming links.
This incoming link issue des not really have anything to do with search engine rankings or traffic on the specific page either nd it does only apply to marketing companies that provide linking to related websites.
There is no reason to run after PageRank levels if you not provide others with links, in that case its only to make money for link portals and does not have anything to do with business websites or useful websites for common website usage…
Does anyone know how can I add many websites and increase the pag rank so that the other search reasults that come corresponding to one search is not at the top of the google search!!!!!
A very useful article. My page rank zoomed to 4 when I first started my site. 9 months later when hits have rocketed by 1200%, we are above benchmark figures by far and in top place on Google itself for all major keywords, Google decides to put the PR down to 3. Additionally I think Google analytics are rubbish compared to Alexa. According to Google my site gets 50% brazilian hits, 25% US and 12.5% UK. With Alexa it is 37% US, 32% UK and 17.5% Brazilian- a much more likely scenario. I am no longer bothered.
Taking Woody’s “hat racks” or “hatracks” example the biggest number remains “unknown”. That is, how many hat racks does SERP #1 Position #1 sell compared to SERP #1 Position #2?
It all has nothing to do with PR.
Organize-It has position #1 for hatracks and #2 for hat racks.
The next players are NexTag and Amazon.
I’m guessing Amazon sells more hat racks then Organize-It.
Then, we ask, how much $ does each of them spend to get this position? In other terms, how much more are YOU PAYING for your trusty ol’ hat rack because of this position?
Personally, I’ve been finding the “deals” from companies on SERPS anywhere from 27 on …”. I save money, big time!
So much for PR and SEO, hey!?!
Everyone likes to speak hits and wow me with your visitors. How much is each visitor worth to you? How much is each hit worth to you?
For example, a dude who stops at a convenience store each day to and from work may be worth $3600 a year to the convenience store operator. Multiple that by a 1000 dudes (or dudettes) a day.
That’s a lotta buckaroos with a ZERO PR, hey!?!
With a ZERO SEO, hey, hey!?!
Same with the LIBRARY SEARCH ENGINE.
Now, we gotta train Google and such how to benefit the People.
Thus far, Google has benefited Google. They got the billions.
Do you!?!
If a large company with tech related products has no PageRank then, to me, that’s a really bad sign. It’s not the be all and end all but it gives you a quick visual indication of the site’s importance and further research can confirm or deny this (usually confirm in my experience). If you don’t think it makes any sense to you then get rid of it from your toolbar! (But I bet everyone will keep it there)
Recently Matt Cutts was at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 talking about search engine optimization. In this video he also talked about Google page rank. You can check it out at this link http://ldfeeds.com/wordcamp/straight-from-google-what-you-need-to-know-matt-cutts-wordcamp-san-francisco-2009/
Excellent presentation, thanks for the link Scott. We can see here that even if PR is not the only thing you have to worry about, it still determines how often and how deep google crawl your website for updates, which is important if you update your content often.
Some interesting points. Of course Google are now going to be taken web site peformance into consideration for page ranking and have introduced performance metrics into their webmaster / seo tool. So if you site performance poorly your page ranking may decrease…