Is PageRank Still Significant?
PageRank has garnered a lot of attention, and the continuous updates to PageRank seem to indicate that things are going through a slight change. Sites that were once ranked lower have risen, while sites that used to be ranked higher have dropped a bit. With the arrival of yet another Google PageRank update, it makes for another opportunity to debate whether or not PageRank is as important as it once was.
With each update to PageRank, Google seems to be expanding “their differentiation between bogus links and links which are earned,” according to Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal.
PageRank was once a huge force in the SEO world, one that was put on a temporary pedestal only to be stripped of most of its supernatural allure in the eyes of most SEO pundits. Now it is seen by most as only part of the entire equation and not the equation itself.
On a scale of PR1 to PR10 (PR10 being the highest), new sites are being indexed anywhere between PR1 and PR5, with sites once ranked PR3 or PR4 seeing a one-point increase with the new update. Meanwhile, sites that had higher rankings in the past are seeing one-point drops, especially those ranked in the PR5 to PR8 class. PR8’s and PR9’s used to be the untouchable score, but now it seems that PR7 has taken that honor.
So, with all of the shifting of rankings, are site owners still chasing after high PR’s? Not according to SEO Company’s Bob Mutch, who said “People in the know are no longer chasing after a higher Toolbar PR. The emphasis has shifted to getting links from relevant sites that are in DMOZ and Yahoo directories, press releases, links in news sites, and then highly prized .gov and .edu links.”
Mutch has two theories to explain why PR’s significance has fallen in recent times. The first is that Google has altered the relationship scale between Real PR and Toolbar PR in a way that the 0 to 10 toolbar PR scale displays a lower ranking value for the same Real PR value that a site has. “This theory holds that this is being done to discourage people from acquiring links based strictly on the Toolbar PR value,” Mutch said.
His second theory is that “as there are more pages in the Google index, the relationship scale between Real PR and Toolbar PR changes due to the increase of the pages in the index. With the increase of pages it takes higher Real PR to get the same Toolbar PR.”
Andy Hagans, an SEO professional, says that “With each new Google update, it is apparent that PageRank counts for less, while other factors (trust, age, authority links) count for more.”
Hagans went on to say that Toolbar PR is now only a good approximate indication of the link popularity of a site and clear sign that the site is not blocked by Google. “But as long as Google continues to show PageRank in the toolbar, it will never ‘die’ in the public consciousness,” he said.
What’s the moral of this story? PageRank should not be the sole primary focus of any site’s SEO strategy. Instead, sites should focus mostly on the traditional aspects of SEO, which includes unique content, press release and article distribution, and being linked by highly ranked and regarded websites.
Though PageRank remains a popular and easy way to see how popular a site is, to most industry experts it is no longer as authoritative or telling as it used to be. As Joe Griffin, President of SubmitAWebsite.com says, “PageRank, really at the end of the day is just the icing on the cake.”
Source:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/
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TheUnImportanceOfPageRank.html
