Google Pagerank – It (does or does not) matter.

Benn — I certainly want to read the comments surely about to pour in, as I haven’t the beginning of a clue to the answer. A friend of mine took it upon themselves yesterday to find out my PR and emailed me, saying it was a 5.

I don’t know whether to be happy, disappointed, or apathetic. Your answer is the one I’m most curious to read

Yes it matters.

Great question Benn. I know you know the answer, but great to have discussion anyways….PageRank is a simple way for people to quantify the progress they are making in marketing their website and to assess some sort of value to their site. Other metrics might include number of incoming links or perhaps pages indexed, but these can vary day by day and don’t articulate an overall “strength” or “reach” as simple as a 1 to 10 point scale and your average person probably doesn’t know how to look up incoming links or pages indexed anyways. PageRank is neat, tidy, and easy to understand.

In light of the learning curve involved in understanding SEO, SEM, analytics, search engine rankings, algorithms, etc., PageRank gives anybody, even those with little to no internet experience a simple means to rank their website, even if ultimately, it may not hold much meaning.

On a side note, a very commonly overlooked aspect of PageRank is that just because your home page has a PR4, that does not mean your entire website is PR4. Depending on your interlinking architecture, among other factors, it is likely that other pages on your site are lower then your home page in PR and may actually have a PR of 0 or no PR at all as they may not be indexed. Which brings up another important aspect of PageRank, the ability to assess the authority of specific pages in a simple manner. This can be important on a page by page basis if you are marketing and trying to rank specific pages. So if you are not only building links to your homepage, but inner pages using “deeplinks”, then you have some sort of gauge to assess progress on a page by page basis in PageRank.

PageRank can also help you decide what type of interlinking structure you are going to use in your website and can allow you to concentrate your link juice to specific pages by sculpting your PageRank using nofollow tags to blog the flow of link juice to some pages, enabling it to be used elsewhere. One example would be to nofollow all links to your Contact Us page, a page you probably don’t care about getting high rankings for anyways so that this juice is used for pages that you do care about achieving high rankings with. PageRank helps users access an arbitrary measure through PageRank to make such decisions…..again, even if ultimately PageRank is not meaningful in search engine rankings, it is still a tool or guide in such decision making and provides webmasters with the ability to control the “power” or “linkjuice” that each page has and manipulate this power using “nofollow” if they decide this is a strategy in line with their goals.

While PageRank doesn’t necessarily equate to high rankings (quality content will tend to rank higher then lower quality content from a site with a higher PR, part of the reason Google is so good, it realizes the end user benefits by being given the highest quality content possible.), at the end of the day, a rising tide lifts all ships, so if you are marketing your site, building quality content and engaging in ethical link building practices, I tend to think that your PageRank is going to increase, but keep in mind, PageRank is a LAGGING INDICATOR, so you will be likely be having success before you see your PageRank increase and it is unlikely that the day your PageRank updates and you are now at a higher PR, you will suddenly experience higher rankings……..

I’ll admit, I’m not Mary McKnight, but I do have some experience on SEO/SEM . During a break in college several years ago, I decided to devote some time testing some tactics against Google. I created a web site targeting “underwater photography” that had no pictures. By the end of 10 days, it ranked #1. It stayed there without any additional work for well over 6 months. THERE WERE NO PICTURES. That site maintained a PR of zero, despite two updates during that time. My current site is apparently a PR 4 due to the last update, but it still isn’t in the top 10 for my selected search terms and sites that haven’t been updated in over a year are ranked above me with similar (+/- 1) PR. So I have seen too many instances where PR has nothing to do with SERPs or relevance, so I don’t really care anymore, other than for bragging rights.

(again, I’m not Mary and will never pretend to be)

I am certainly no expert, but I think it matters…to a point. Page rank is a very general indicator of how strong a site is. However PR can be faked and manipulated which dilutes its usefulness. I look at it, but I don’t care as long as I rank in the SERPs.

In general, I say, yes, page rank matters. The question that must also be asked, however, is “to whom?” If a business relies only on Google to get people to a site, then it certainly matters. That business probably doesn’t want to appear on the 21st page of search results. If a business has established branding and marketing that drives people to a site without solely relying on Google, then page rank may be less critical; look at The Gap store. If you google “jeans”, Gap’s website is not on the first page. But most people already know about the Gap and their product line.

How many people submit a search, then go to page 12 FIRST to view results? LOL

Of COURSE it matters. Whether it matters enough to you to do something about it is another story. There are plenty of successful agents out there “despite” poor rankings. Perhaps they’d have more business if they ranked higher on searches.

It sounds like sour grapes. Those that say it doesn’t matter wish they ranked higher. But you can have a great ranking and still flop as an agent, you have to have the basis of success, to turn the leads into business. THAT is success, not page rankings. High rankings just means you have more leads to turn in the first place, which makes your job easier in the long run, but it’s no measure of success by itself.

John Connolly

Of course it matters, what you see may not be the real thing however. My site has be from 5 to 3 but still ranks well for my terms. It is much harder to get internal pages to rank higher.

>If you believe in long-tail search, PR matters even less

Page rank is the long tail’s best friend. The depth of crawl on your site, and to those long tail pages, is directly related to PR.

Nick, I would argue that you are making my point, but missing the point because you are looking at it from a different perspective.

>If you conducted a long-tail search for my targeted keywords a month and a half ago, it came up #1 with a page rank 0.

It’s not about the PR of the long tail page – it’s about the PR of the pages linking to it.

Google has said they punish sites for buying links for the purpose of increasing page rank. Matt Cutts has also discussed the use of “nofollow” for the purpose of “PR sculpting”. Of course page rank is important and it impacts rankings.

I’ll leave you with this, from Matt Cutts:

Bear in mind that rankings do change all the time, especially for bloggy items. One common reason is when multiple people blog about something, it’s often on the front page of their blogs, and front pages typically have the highest PageRank. As stories scroll off the front page of peoples’ blogs, there’s often a dip in ranking because the links tend to be from deeper pages with lower PageRank.

In AR terms, “google juice”.

… just one more frivolous thing to worry about. No, not really, but yes, kinda.

Mary – Higher Google PR does not necessarily equate to higher search engine results placement.

I think GPR is most relevant to those who watch green bars. I think it is meaningless to most of my readers.

I’m not sure about the PR juice passing part, but search engine rankings are definitely what real estate agents want….to be found and that usually means the first page. Mariana, I know what you mean, yes one more thing to worrry about.