What’s PageRank Got To Do With It

Recently, a few of my clients have asked me, “Just How Important Is Google and Page Rank? ”

Google itself is very important. It’s the world’s most popular search engine and it powers Yahoo! and AOL. Being listed is crucial for successful online marketing. But Page Rank doesn’t hold the weight one my think it does.

What Marketers & Business Owners Use Page Ranks For

Google Page Rank is said to be “for entertainment value only,” but marketers and site owners use it for a variety of things:

1. To determine the value of a site
2. To determine the trustworthiness of a site
3. To determine the safety of a website & how credible a site is compared to that of it’s competitors’ site
4. To determine how long a business has been around

Well, I don’t think it’s reliable for any of those reasons:

1. What do you define and quantify a site’s value? There is not real formula to determine this.
2. How can you determine trustworthiness from page ranks? I don’t believe a site with a with a PR6 is better get information off than a site with a PR3. If the information on the site with the lower PageRank is better, then that is were I am getting my information from.
3. Safety relates to trust. If I am looking to purchase goods and I find two sites that have that product, and Site #1 has a PR6 and Site #2 has a PR3, but Site #2 has the most security options for online transactions, I am going with Site #2 as it clearly cuts my risk of online identity theft.
4. This is irrelevant, you can’t use a website’s pagerank to determine professional reliability. I often design sites for companies that have been in business 5, 10 or even 20 years, but they haven’t had a web presence until now. So while their site may be a year old, but they themselves has a long solid history outside their web presence. Also, may old sites that have not been optimized properly or that don’t have many links to have have low page ranks.

So if you site isn’t ranking, don’t fret. Generally a new site will have a PR 0 for a few months (on average - SIX) until Google does a PR update. And remember, page rank doesn’t single-handedly determine where your site shows up in the searches it’s in. If Google “thinks” your site is about the search given, and others aren’t, you’ll move up. (Where “thinks” means, “can determine from links to your page, linguistic and text analysis, query analysis, etc”) For example, if it’s a multi-word search, and your page is the only one to have all the words, you’ll most likely show up first.

The only real benefit of a high PR is better organic search rankings, which can be achieved by a well thought out marketing strategy.

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