Does the Google Page Rank Really Mean Anything, Anymore?
3 May 2008
47 CommentsWith the recent Google Page Rank Update, my Google PR jumped from 0 to 4. This update has been a similar treat for a few other blogs that I read often, like Net Entrepreneur (Alex) and Untwisted Vortex (RT Cunningham). However brief discussions with Will Taft (Will Taft’s Blog) over IM and some comments to my previous post about the PR update for Inspirit made me think if this PR update by Google really makes any serious sense or not?
I observed the PR for a few sites that get much more traffic than my blog, are much more popular and have much more backlinks pointing to them than my blog. Here are some statistics that I’d like you to take a look at for a moment:
| Website | Alexa Traffic Rank |
Yahoo Backlinks |
Google Backlinks |
Google Page Rank |
| Blogging Zoom | 91,019 | 105,000 | 21,296 | 4 |
| Blog Engage | 99,048 | 33,400 | 9,448 | 3 |
| Post on Fire | 111,689 | 14,200 | 2,981 | 4 |
| Inspirit | 167,493 | 800 | 1,067 | 4 |
With the poorest Alexa traffic rank and with the least number of Yahoo and Google backlinks out of all these websites, they stand at either the same level as me, or below!
Page Rank is the Google’s view of importance of a web page. The number of Yahoo and Google backlinks pointing to Inspirit is not even 10 % of the backlinks pointing to Blogging Zoom. Even then, is Blogging Zoom more or less of same importance as Inspirit Blog in Google’s View?
Will had a good point about Google Page Rank system being watered down in his comment to my previous post. “Another Pointless Blog” in my blog-roll has only 3 posts in the last 3 months, two out of which are guest posts by me! Still that blog has managed to get a PR 2 status.
I was quite excited about getting a good Page Rank for my blog and hope to get some more search engine traffic from this. But do you think seeing all this happen, anyone will take this PR update or the whole Page Rank thing itself, seriously? I highly doubt it.
few care about pagerank updates anymore
I remember when my site’s rank was 5 when it was just a month old last year when all the paid links penalties were being applied by google…thats LESS THAN A MONTH OLD! It fell to four in the update after that and I seriously don’t care what it is now.
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Congrats to you Abhi
so happy after I got stuck on PR 3 for 4 months!
My blog is PR 5 now
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I noticed that with a pagerank 2 I get my pages indexed faster. Maybe if you have higher pagerank you get indexed quicker.
I posted yesterday and was listed in google today for my long tail keyword phrase.
Another great post.
Larry
Larry Riveras last blog post..How to pay for your Success University business.
As long as you have a blog and have some ping sites set up you get indexed in like an hour.
It is confusing. There are also some sites that make me wonder if there is a penalty involved or something. For example, the ProBlogger site is PR 6. Is that site really only one rank better than my humble blog at PR 5? If I am a 5, I would expect ProBlogger to be at least 7 or 8?
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I was happy that my page rank went from 2 to 4. But it’s probably irrational – bloggers don’t seem to believe in page rank terribly much (I’m not sure alexa and the others are much better). When I get a huge spike in traffic due to a stumble it doesn’t seem to shift the ranking of any of them much, which seems strange.
People seem to believe more in google analytics.
I guess we really need some very good techie person to explain what is really going on.
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I wouldn’t say Alexa is much better.. but I’d say its getting better.. What we really need to understand is that unless we are wrong if we think that we really understand metrics like Google PR and use them to our benefit. All that, that can help us to make it big in the blogosphere is to just keep working on what we write and market it ethically without caring much for various ranks and levels we crack.
Do appreciate positive changes for your blog but don’t get carried away by them. To me, these don’t really mean much anymore!
I came to the conclusion about 2 years ago that PR had almost no correlation with rankings or Google traffic.
Now it just seems Google is using it as a means to confuse webmasters and to incite FUD over link selling.
A wonderful blog, thanks
Eh, I wrote about “Pagerank is just a number, who cares?” a while back at Google PR is just a number. Who cares?
And I agree with you, it’s becoming worthless as time goes on. I mean, I have a blog that was recently given a PR3 and I haven’t updated anything since… December. Matter of fact, it barely has backlinks so how the hell did I end up with a PR3?!
Jay
Jays last blog post..Who is an Entrecard Addict? Here’s 20 Reasons That Say You Are!
Mine hasn’t been updated yet.. I wonder if it will get updated at all. Oh well, as you said, who cares?
As long as my posts get good PR for search engine results, who cares about my main blog?
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I cannot agree more, Michael.
You are right but still Google has more repo than others in market
A lot of my sites jumps from PR0 to PR3. And lots of the others sites drowned from PR4 to PR0. Just don’t know what’s going on with it. Maybe it just got haywired.
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I’m having my site at pr 0 – no changes whatsoever, although many of my sites had a sudden pr increase (on the other hand, some had a decrease – all the way to 0).
I don’t know what to do, or if I should do anything at all?
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Points are so nice. Useful information is provided for bloggers, web masters and SEO experts. I am going to implement all your tips at my site. This is really fantastic.
PR is nice, but nowhere near as important as keyword authority for ranking high in the SERPs. It’s not unusual to see very low PR sites beat PR 7 or 8 sites for specific keyword phrases.
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[...] those widgets is an indicator of the activity on your blog in case you don’t have a good page rank or Alexa rank. It is worth all the extra traffic and subscribers you get through these networks. [...]
Would you be interested in exchanging blogrolls links with my site? Please email me if you are interested or you can add my link at your blogrolls and Notice me by email kaiyure#gmail.com(replace # as @), I will add your link later, thanks.
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I think pr depends on keywords in some way. Not sure how but some sites get ranked very well for little amount of links. I know one thing page rank helps but i would always rather have good search engine results or serp for the keywords i want than a pr6 page that is not listed for keyword terms.
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Google has more repo than others in market
People still look at PR when are buying links. And that was the reason of the Google’s crusade against links sold to increase PR and rankings
I think that Google re-visit your website more when the Page Rank is higher. It is also have an advantage in the search results. But it is not the most important factor today. And the way it is caculated is changing all the time.
I’ve just found your excellent blog. You have some really useful articles in here – so I shall be back for another read when I get back from work. Keep it coming…
If you updated your blog on a regular basis with useful content, you should have little problem ranking well in Google and other search engines.
I saw your PR is down to 2. Do you have any idea why that happened? I mean, I’m pretty sure you have more links pointing to your blog now than you had in May last year.
I would be really curious to know how the different page rank affected your traffic. I still believe that PR is important, but I would like to know a correlation between a PR and traffic. That’s what this blog is about after all.
I don’t believe PR is weighed heavily in the algorithm anymore. More important is the anchor text and quality of your backlinks which pertain to the keyword that you are searching.
Dans latest published blog-post ………. Hard Rock Tampa Super Bowl Party
so nice post and thank for that.
Someone mentioned earlier that Google indexes sites that have higher PR. That’s not true!
I am actually finding lately that Google seems to be counting link popularity more than PR.
You never knoew how they will rank a site. Sometimes you could have more links and have lower pr and sometimes not. I have seen sites with few links no Pr that are listed in top 5 of google for some good keywords. Can not figure it out so just be happy when your site is doing well and keep up the good work.
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I am coming across more and more posts on blogs, forums and websites about this subject. I think the reason for this is that I have found that Google places more emphasis on link popularity now than on page rank. After years of everyone going after PR Google has probably had to dampen the effect in order to maintain relevant results.
Lee
Google’s Page Rank has lost a lot of validity, however, I think that it’s still a good general measuring stick for the strength or influance of your website. It’s not completely worthless.
I’m not sure why still SEO’s still chase after Google PR/
PageRank(PR) can be used partly to evaluate a website’s importance and indicate its link popularity. For example if you check high PageRank sites, usually you will see lots of backlinks. So it can give you an idea whether a website is worth it or not. But lower PR sites can also have more backlinks than higher PR sites as lower PR doesn’t necessarily mean less backlinks. So relying only on that little green bar is not conducive to judging a website’s quality. Lower PR sites are also of value as well as they can get loads of traffic even with a smaller green bar. PR is only one of the measures to analyze a site and is not the end of all.
PageRank does matter but now what matters most for people who are targeting some traffic is SERPs, they matter a lot and then PageRank. Anyways if you’ve got a good PR, thats great and now make sure you’ve got somewhere near your competitors SERPs or even better.
It seems a lot of people don’t think page rank is that important these days and I’m inclined to agree. It often doesn’t correlate with the SERPS, with low PR sites ranking better than high PR sites. It’s probably one of many things google considers. So it can help, but doesn’t neccessarily help that much. I do think it’s better to get backlinks from high PR sites if you can.
Very informative blogs. Thanks for sharing. Keep posting!
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nice article… interesting…
Hey, this is a bit irrelevant, but I noticed your blog page loaded lightning fast compared to mine. So I was wondering are you using dedicated hosting or shared hosting? thanks.
Google’s Page Rank has lost a lot of validity, however, I think that it’s still a good general measuring stick for the strength or influance of your website.
Google PageRank is good for impressing human beings, not search engine algorithms.
then why my pagerank is getting down?
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Yes, it is a bit strange that the site with the lowest links and alexa rank is still a page rank 4 when the others sites have more links etc and are also page rank 4. Maybe there are other factors that contribute highly to what page rank a site is?
I never appreciate alexa much because getting a good alexa rank is much easy. Simply you have install the alexa tool bar that’s all you rank will pop up day by day sure. But the Google page rank is always mater and its depends on volume of your site that means how informative your site is.
Google page rank always put some extra wait on value of your site. The web master always tries to exchange their link with high rank web page or blog. And it affects good result on search engine result page. Google page rank is also called page rank. I always try to get more page rank for my Blog and Websites.
I have a program called traffictravis that list the top
20 sites for a keyword. In the list I have found PR 0
at the list on some of the websites listed. I don’t
feel a PR is necessary these days.
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Hi,
Thanks for this details, Even sometimes I do promotion of my blog but I did not know all these details and even I never tried to do..
Thanks