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!