How Important Is Page Rank For Your Website?
Page Rank, or PR, is a value assigned to a particular web page by Google on a scale of 0 to 10. Most readers will be well aware of Google’s rating system. The intent of this article is not to talk about the intricacies of Google Page Rank and it’s mysterious algorithm but instead to ask you what is more important, traffic or PR value?
The value and desirability of Page Rank has long been a big topic of discussion among webmasters. Google keeps secret as much as possible its methods of rating a webpage and is almost constantly changing and trying to improve them. However, there are a lot of factors that are at least partially understood. One factor behind PR is known to be backlinks. There is a lot of disagreement about the specifics, but most webmasters agree that backlinks are an important part of PR.
It is often said that Google wants to keep their PR rating and SERP (Search Engine Results Position) methods secret because they want to avoid cheating and manipulation. It is much more likely that their original motive was to protect their methods from competing search engines and only later was the issue of manipulation considered.
Not too long ago a webmaster could spend several hundred dollars on directory submissions and links on high PR pages and quickly build the PR value of their own WebPages. This manipulation of Google’s PR changed the entire process and made PR something you could buy. Google has since cracked down on “link sellers” and as a result many webmaster saw big drops in PR.
Yet even today on most webmaster forums the PR of a website is the major factor in its selling price. I have seen very nice websites with lots of unique and interesting content go unsold because they had little or no PR value. No consideration is usually given to the content or even the design and the general rule is that the higher the PR the higher the selling price.
When a webmaster offers a link for sale it is common to see a subject line like, “PR5 Link For Sale…” There are still many who believe the value of a link is limited by the linking pages PR. Their are many variables that can determine the value of any link to your site and PR is not among the most important.
Here are just a few factors that are more important than PR when looking at a backlink.
Quality of Linking Page
Is the website unique and interesting?
Relevancy
Is the webpage theme similar to your site? A link to your fishing website will be worth more on another fishing webpage than it would on an unrelated page,
Traffic
How much traffic does the linking page receive and is it targeted?
Number of other Links
If there are a larger number of other links on the page visitors will be less likely to notice yours and visit your site. Another consideration here is the relevancy of the links. A quality website will link only to other pages that would be of interest to their readers.
I don’t even care about nofollow vs dofollow when I see a new backlink. What is really important is if it is a “people follow” link. I usually find these links when looking at stats. If you endeavor to publish interesting and informative content others out there WILL link to you and recommend you on their own. These webmasters, bloggers and even forum members link to your webpage because they like it and people will follow these links to your website.
I would rather have a PR0 link that sends me actual traffic than I would a PR8 that did not. PR is not as important as it once was and as time passes its importance will lessen even more. I think we will be needing a new term to replace SEO. I suggest HBO “Human Being Optimization”.
Written by David Slone, Copyright 2009 HonestInformation.com all rights reserved and may not be republished in any form.
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10 Responses to “How Important Is Page Rank For Your Website?”
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I agree that Page Rank has been over emphasized and misused. I think we need a better page ranking system
I’m fairly new to marketing online and the more I read about this subject PR, the more it gets confusing. As long as the website is attracting traffic to make it worthwhile, does PR really matter?
Page rank is an important aspect in internet marketing and SEO. This gauges your site’s worth as well its accessibility to readers and customers.
I disagree. Accessibility to readers is basically your SERPs which are not directly related to the PR
I think Page Rank or PR is still the most important factor for Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs).
But you “hit the nail on the head” .
Most of those threads are utterly valueless. Most of those PR selling pages/sites will loose their PR by net update and your huge investments in buying them would go waste.
So rather than buying links on the basis of PR, I always suggest to type the keyword/phrase (say — ” free mobile ringtones”) on Google and take as many links as possible out of top 300 results. There might only be a 10-20 % success rate – but that is 10 times more valuable than those forums links with relevant PR4/5/6 links.
Just my 2 paisa.
I totally agree, I used to belong to a site that gradually became like a witches meeting place. If it had remained with the original welcome type style, it would still be up there as one of the top ranking, as they had good content, but they had to go and take their readers for granted and then mock people unnecessarily, so it dropped right back.
So, content and how you treat your readers is equally important, if not more so.
I am very new to all this, but i have learned that this does matter, just by doing my own research and concentrating a lot less (after the initial period) on how great your site looks.
JMO…if you look at your site as a similar source of info as a newspaper. I think the sites that are considerate and concentrate on that will keep their traffic coming back. Take trueghosttales.com. This site is always at the top, and although i’m no expert, one of the reasons is because the readers feel comfortable in there. That is how i want my site to be too.
Its very important for the site, especially when you promote your site on net. PR helps a lot in exchanging link with other site, in directory submission and in article submission. So all over its too useful to a particular site, don’t ignore the PR of a site.
I thought your article was great at covering all the basics. While backlinks are now less important in pr, I think relevancy is becoming important. With so many ways to ad backlinks to directories and the increase of selling links, there is no real way to increase relevancy other than to write or add unique, keyword directed content and linking to sites with similar topics (agreeing with your fishing analogy). Great work on making this article very accurate!
First of all, I want to thank the Almighty God for the enlightening answer that Bro. ,
That is the essential question that we must all ask ourselves. ,