Is Page Rank Important?
Posted by admin on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment 
In my last post
I’ve been
talking about how
the nofollow
attribute affects
the Page Rank flow
through your website
and to external
links. But is Page
Rank really
important to even
pay attention to it?
After all, even
Google seems to be
paying little to no
attention to it in
their advice to us.
The answer, I think,
is two fold. It all
depends on where you
stand as a
webmaster.
On one hand, Page
Rank will not bring
you traffic –
search engines and
other websites
linking to you will.
But the correlation
between your
rankings and your
Page Rank is almost
non-existent, that
is to say, having a
PR of 5
doesn’t
guarantee you the
position #5 for your
keyword (it
doesn’t even
guarantee you any
position on the
first page). There
are a lot more
important factors
than PR when it
comes to ranking
your website.
Other websites will
not link to you
because of your big
PR either. But they
will if your site is
interesting enough
to be worthwhile to
link to.
So why should you
care about the PR at
all? Well, you
shouldn’t.
There’s really
no point in paying
attention to the
Page Rank of your
most important web
pages. There’s
no point in tracking
it, eagerly waiting
for the green bar to
increase. Well, to
be honest, it does
give you some
gratification to see
it grow – even
if it means nothing
to your website,
it’s still an
achievement that
gives you bragging
rights if nothing
else.
The question is, why
do I even bother to
write about it not
once but twice, and
why people even
create Wordpress
plug-ins to protect
it? The reason is
that there’s
still a good use of
this indicator. Page
Rank provides a
rough but quick
estimation of
page’s
importance.
Just because you
cannot say anything
about rankings on
Google from looking
at page’s PR,
doesn’t mean
that you can’t
say anything about
it. It is obvious
that Google’s
algorithms calculate
and pay big
attention to the
“authority”.
So for example, an
article in NY Times
will most likely
outrank an article
on this blog for the
same keywords. And
chances are, that
same article in NY
Times will get a PR
sooner than a post
on this blog.
That is, a PR can
also indicate the
authority. It
doesn’t mean
that a page with no
PR has no authority,
and it doesn’t
necessarily mean
that a page with PR
has big authority.
But it sure means
that a page with PR
of 5 is likely to be
assigned to a page
that has some
importance.
The practical use of
that is, of course,
link building. Yes,
ladies and
gentlemen, PR is the
first thing
you’ll look
for in a page before
an attempt to place
your own link on it
for SEO purposes no
matter what. That
doesn’t mean
it’s the only
metric you’ll
look for (for
instance, a number
of outgoing links is
even more
important), but
it’s the
metric most obvious
and easiest to look
up.
To conclude, and as
the answer to the
original question
– is PR
important? It
is
important
if you
systematically work
on your
website’s
rankings in search
engines. However,
you might as well
forget it if you let
the SEO happen
“naturally”
and get your traffic
from other, often
much easier traffic
sources.
