Why the Google PageRank of your blog does not matter
Ah, Google PageRank. The crown of every newbie blogger. Yup that’s right, I said it: Google PageRank doesn’t mean squat. Unless of course you are a newbie blogger.
PageRank is a value from 1 to 10 that Google assigns to websites in its index. The higher the PR value, the more authority and credibility a site has. Naturally, Google is the only website with a PageRank of 10 and all of the lesser websites are given values from 0-9.
Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specialising in results-driven search engine marketing, website design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. First sourced at Search Engine Land.
Newbie blog marketers pay a lot of attention to Google PageRank because it is a simple number. Unfortunately, using a blog’s PR value to judge its worth is like judging who the best baseball player is solely on the number of homeruns hit. There are so many other factors not considered.
Word to the wise: The best way to determine the monetary value or success of a blog is by measuring traffic, not PageRank.
What determines the Google PageRank of your blog?
Google determines the PageRank of your blog based on the number of backlinks from external PR pages (pages assigned a Google PageRank value). Backlinks are links from other sites pointing to pages on your blog. Sites that have high PR will ostensibly give your site more PR juice and increase your PR value.
PageRank should NOT be confused with search engine rank. Search engine rank is how your site or a page on your site ranks for a keyword typed into a search engine. Search engine rank is determined by backlinks as well as many other factors. PageRank is ONLY determined by the number of backlinks to your site with PR values.
How do you check your blog’s Google PageRank?
The easiest way to check the Google PageRank of your blog is to use a simple PR checker tool. Keep in mind that PR checker tools send data requests to one of Google’s data centers. Individual data centers may not be up to date on the PageRank of your page. You may want to check PR on a different tool (which accesses a different data center) if you think the value returned is inaccurate.
When is the Google PageRank of your blog updated?
Google keeps the dates and times of major PageRank updates classified. They does this to counteract the people who try to manipulate the ranking system. The major updates usually take place between the time space of 2-3 months but some months can have as many as 3 major updates. On rare occasions the PR of your blog can change in-between major updates.
What if I don’t have a PageRank?
You should not worry if your PageRank is 1, 0 or N/A. It doesn’t necessarily mean that your site is on the bottom of the food chain. New sites can take up to a year to be assigned a PageRank and when they are assigned a PageRank, they tend to slip quite easily.
An Alexa ranking acts as a much better representation of a blog’s value than does Google PageRank because it is based on traffic rather than backlinks. Unfortunately, Alexa is just as prone to inaccuracy as Google PageRank is.
That leaves good old fashion reports from your traffic analytics software to be the best and most accurate representation of your blog’s worth.
Tags: blog seo, google, link building, traffic
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I tend to agree with the fact that PR is not that important. However, it holds some kind of weight in the Google algorithm.
And Google is not the only website with a 10.
Daniel,
There are lot of websites that has PR10.
Ex: http://www.usa.gov/
Don´t think about the PR too much. Think about Domainpop, Keywords mixed from some different sources (Freeblogs, Authority Domains, “Real-Blog-Comments”, and “Real-Links”) and your website will work.
I stopped caring about PR years ago, and instead started focusing on the more important factor that most people go for…traffic.
PR doesn’t always mean more traffic. I’ve seen sites with high PR that had little to zero traffic, and sites with low PR getting huge amounts.
A few websites (for example white house) hava a PR of 10. A pagerank is important when you get backlinks. Here you need a lot of more backlinks with PR 0 than with PR 4 or 5 for a better ranking.
Dan’s right. I also saw some websites with high page ranks but had little traffic. If you’re talking about Alexa’s inaccuracy, I agree with you. They don’t necessarily portray the sites statistics however they do give some information about your site. And that’s good enough for me.
I thought that PR was important in that is how your site can appear higher in the serps for related terms.
If you dont have a high PR and dont appear high in serps how are you going to get any traffic ?