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PageRank: Is It A Toy or Is It For Real?
I remember when I first got serious about SEO and Google came out with their Google Toolbar, which provided quite a few gadgets. The one piece that struck the SEO industry is the Google PageRank. So when you are what they call a “newbie†to the industry you read every article and all the forums to learn as much as you can (but taking it with a grain of salt).
I do recall reading over and over again that PageRank is a toy. Some suggested we should ignore it. Others advocated that we shouldn’t be ignored – important factors go into that little green bar and so on. Later, everyone began to learn that a solid gray bar means your site has been banned and/or penalized from the index. A solid white bar means that Google hasn’t decided how to rank your site. It has been an endless debate. I myself have gone along with the group to ignore the toy.
It has been mentioned that PageRank is based on an equation PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) with countless factors involved. How can so many factors be put into place to raise the green bar up one notch? How can the PageRank not be part of the organic search result? Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re both based off similar equations, aren’t they? Organic search basically starts with the keyword matching game, then the relevancy game, keyword density and more. But how does Google determine that a given site be in the No. 1 position? Sounds like some sort of calculation to me!
A very well written explanation of PageRank is available here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/05/google-pagerank-what-do-we-really-know-about-it/.
Some people will also knock PageRank – and that’s OK. For example, websites can rank high for fairly competitive keywords even with a low PageRank. Yet, it may not be worthless. I’ve discovered that PageRank has a lot more value than I first thought.
Folks…PageRank is for real!
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Comments
2 Comments so far2 Responses to “PageRank: Is It A Toy or Is It For Real?”
Search rankings are what is important, not PR. We have to frequently remind our clients of this because so much emphasis is put on PR. If a client wants to be top 10 for a certain keyword then we work toward achieving that but we never think “oh we just need to have a PageRank of 5 and we’ll be happy.”
SEO is about traffic not a single statistic. How much can a little green bar ranging from 0-10 really mean anyway? I’m certainly not losing sleep over it.
Todd,
Thank you for reading our blog. Some do emphasize the PR as the “holy grailâ€, but for others you can’t help ignore the green bar and ways to increase the rank to become noticed in the top positions. I’m all for the targeted traffic and if it happens to raise the PR up one notch, I’m happy too!
Beth