So What's The Big Deal About PageRank?

I was reading a thread from a few months ago, about how UncoverTheNet.com got it’s Page Rank dropped from PR8 to PR0, allegedly because they bought links and raised up too fast for the likings of Google.

But although this has happened, I don’t really see a drop in their traffic (according to Alexa, anyway-that’s another debate I started that’s still going on). Having seen all this, my question is regarding the importance of PageRank, and why it seems to be almost a badge of honor. It seems that there are some perfectly good sites that still function profitably without any PageRank. I’m wondering, with the exception of communicating importance from person to person, just how valuable PageRank really is? Does it REALLY mean anything? Or are we just all being sheep here? Comments, please.

 

It's close to worthless unless you are in the business of selling links.

I don't know my PRs. What I'm interested in is the money I make from my sites. PR and profit are far from related in my case.

I'm more interested in how many lines of HTML don't validate than my PR. And I don't care much about valid HTML.

 

I have to mostly agree (I don't agree about not validating html because I don't want to tick off any reader over a silly thing like that). I care much more about traffic and income than PR.

However: a lot (a LOT) of my traffic comes to me from searches, and the great majority of those come from Google. The better your PR, the earlier you appear in Google search results, so the more chance of being clicked.. so I do care about PR in that sense.

But in a larger sense, what can I do about it that I wouldn't be doing for other reasons anyway? The best way to improve PR is to be interesting or valuable to relevant sites so that they link to you. Why wouldn't you be doing your best to be relevant, useful and interesting anyway?

So I think of PR the same way I think of my own personal reputation: I don't really care what you think of me, but I do have personal standards of behavior, and if I follow those closely, you probably will think well of me. Same thing with PR: the things that cause better PR are important to me for other reasons, so I do them.

 

Same here, my most recent site had 92 errors

 

Well for a lot of people most their income comes from PR...

 

Are you handcoding html? If so, you might use Tidy to clean it up (see http://aplawrence.com/Words/2005_02_02.html if you have a Unix or Linux based host)

In any case, you can validate your pages at http://validator.w3.org/

Amusingly enough, the page I referenced above had a bunch of careless html errors in it I used to be very lax about this, so my older pages are apt to have errors, but I do check all new pages now, and fix older pages as I get to them.

Even more amusing was that http://aplawrence.com/foo-web/validating-pages.html had 25 errors when I just now looked at it. Do as I say, not as I do, I guess..

 

I only care about PR so far as it is an easy (but not always accurate) measure of a site's link popularity. It is better than just counting inbound links, because it takes link quality into factor as much as link quantity.

 

PR directly doesn't really affect serps all that much, but the anchor text of those incoming links causing that high PR does directly affect serps. And, it's generally accepted that the higher the PR incoming link (as long as it's relevant), the more it helps.

 

Well, usually income is related to traffic. At least, the more traffic you have, the more potential customers you have.

As I've seen my page rank slowly increase, I've also seen a substantially proportional increase in traffic, and a slight increase in income through ads.

Joshua

 

You dont "do well" because your PR went up; but your PR went up because you are doing better.

 

People can say it doesn't matter, but in the end PR is what almost all links are judged on for trading/buying/selling. Go check out the link exchange forums here or elsewhere and count how many link requests mention PR vs. those that don't. Or try getting a bunch of PR6 link exchanges with your (example)PR0.

 

Pagerank can be very important however don't focus on it, focus on the other aspects of your site. Linking does raise your pagerank however if you link too much you will be caught also exssesive linking is a bad thing. For example if you were to say link to all sites with a pagerank of 5 then you could actually get a page rank of 5 or close however for example if you were to link to say 10 sites with a page rank of 5 and 100 sites with a page rank of 1 or zero then your page will most likely end up with a zero or ranking of 1 at most. The best thing to do is to completely avoid linking software of any kind. Don't even use sites that will claim to help you exchange links without using link script because google caculates the amount of links you add per day and will determine that you are using link farm software. Try to only exchange links with sites that have content that match your own. Also your own site can generate a number of backlinks on its own as long as they are static. Static backlinks work alot better than dynamic, Pagerank can only get you so far, for example you can have a pagerank of 5 and not even appear on the google search engine for the search terms that you are trying to target.

 

Like it or not, some visitors with basic understanding of the internet and PageRank, do factor in PageRank when they're browsing sites.

Say you're providing webdesign or SEO services, and would like to get some new customers through your fancy site - however Google may or may not take PR into account, the visual representation in the Google Toolbar does matter to some potential customers, as they see PR as a direct link to how good you are.

If not for ranking, at least consider it a factor in marketing your services...

 

That's kinda of point I'm driving at with this post.

UncoverTheNet was a PR8, now their front page ranks as a PR0. But still the traffic comes in, and it seems that the usefulness of the site to its visitors is still vital (as far as the eye can see anyway).

But because Google, now it will probably lose a lot of it's directory revenue, because someone suddenly deemed the sight unworthy of a PR8. Not to mention all of the other sites that will lose out as well, either through traffic, or through affiliation.

To do that to a site, IMHO, is Google taking out a big gun, and shooting themselves in the foot. PageRank is a beast that it started, hopefully to make the Internet a better place, but if this is indicative of the actions it takes, then why should we even CARE about Google?

 

well honestly google is also beggining to only regard big corporations with PR's of above 7 and even then. Eventually only well established search engines will be able to achieve these high numbers.

 

nicerolex,

Don't forget government sites and large consumer orientated sites, they will get the high PR

 

One things I've noticed (I may be wrong about this, however), is that the only PR10 site I've found is Google. Yahoo is a PR9, as is MSN. Favortism? Even ebay ranks as a PR9. I mean, if ANY site should be PR10, it should be these sites I think.

 

PR is not that important anymore these days

 

If PR is important enough to Google for Google itself to spend all that time and money computing and publishing it, I have a sneaky suspicion that maybe it should be important to me, too.