Google "PR" a load of Crap?

I am not a PR junkie by any means. When a lot of people say “it means nothing, stop worrying about it”, most say it with the best intentions. They really mean dont focus on it, which is a good thing. High PR does not equal high serps, and you cannot be found if you do not rank well.

Here is a good example. I can go out and get a lot of links using my domain name and get a high PR. If my domain name does not have my keywords I want to rank for, high pagerank will not help me rank for said desired keywords.

Here is what I know about PageRank:

1. Google does use pagerank as 1 of its parameters in the rankings and says its important:

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

source –
http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

2. Google has said on many differenet occasions that if you want the spiders to dig deeper on site, more PR will solve this problem. Here are a couple of examples from the Google Webmaster Chat in June 2008, which is a very good read – http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/web/q-a-from-the-junetune-live-chat – here are a couple of exerpts:

Q: Typically, what % of the websites’ pages does Google index from large sites
A (Bergy Berghausen): That depends on the size of the site, its PageRank, and a bunch of other factors. This is hard to generalize for.

Q: what influences the # of pages that get indexed on a site?
A (Bergy Berghausen): As Matt mentioned earlier, it’s mostly PageRank, but there can be some other factors involved.

3. Google has gone out of its way to punish link sellers by removing green bars from the toolbar PR. Googles says time and time again that this is to stop people from gaming the system. IF PR was not a part of the algo, then why would they need to do this to protect their results?

Now some of my thoughts –

4. Yes you can show me countless examples of low PR sites or no PR sites ranking high for keywords, but show me that for a search with over 10 million results.

5. When I look for a site I want my link on, I want it on a page that has pagerank because it shows me that google knows about it, somewhat approves of it, and that it is spidered more often then one with out.

6. I have seen plenty of times where a new site gets a lot of love from google for a month and then gets kicked to the back of the line after the honeymoon. Often times these sites have no PR. Google has some kind of “new news” bonus for new sites. It is possible that these low pr sites are targeting the type of terms that you are noticing.

7. I use pagerank as a tool on my sites to see if everything is OK. Seeing no PR on a page created around the same time as others that do have PR is a good indication to me that something is wrong. Often times this is a good sign of a lack of internal linking, or duplicate meta tags, or duplicate content, or…

8. When I am looking at potential partner sites, I use PR as a tool to see how well the site gets indexed and to see if there are any problems. A PR on the homepage with all interior pages being grey barred or zero indicate a problem to me. A PR 4 with all interior pages being 3’s and 2’s tell me that the webmaster knows what they are doing in terms of google, and that google likes what they are doing.

I have more, but I think I have stated my point. All this being said, more PR does not equal or guarantee more money, more conversions, more traffic, or more results. It is a part of it the puzzle though, and should not be ignored all together. The fact that Google ties deep spidering to PageRank should show you that it is much more important then that little green bar. The deeper the spiders can get, the more pages you get in the index, the more oppurtunities your site will have for potential visitors, the list goes on and on.

The best link you can ever get is from a website which ranks #1 for the keywords you are targetting.

End of.

And if you cant get a link from #1,. try #2, or #3 and so on.

Hi guys

I’ve read your posts. I understand that google PR is an internal indicator and has less (or not) impact on today’s SERP.

5-7 years ago a good incoming link was a High PR Link.

What’s a good incoming link today?

1. Relevant Content (Page – Page)?
2. Relevant Content (Site – Site)?
3. Alexa?
4. Link popularity of that page
5. Other?

I want to have clear what to look for when another webmaster offers me a link.

Thanks a lot

inaly what i said before is starting to be validated. PR has lost its importance alltogether.

This comment by Matt Cutts on PR gave me a clearer view on it:

Matt Cutts Said,
June 3, 2008 @ 9:31 pm
“…But remember that we only push PageRanks to the toolbar every 3-4 months”

If it was that important a metric surely they would be aggressively updating it – if not for webmasters then at least so that Google users will be able to ascertain at a glance if a site is an authority or not.

Is it worth keeping an eye on? Sure.

Worth losing sleep over? No.

PR does mean very little these days. But it is an indicator, and use it as such, dont use PR as a result. There are other factors out there which also effect your website. Alexa rank, use that as an indicator as well, but not as a result.

The only real value “PR” has for me is that I can sell links from my sites on text-link-ads.com just because I have a high PR ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” /> added to the fact that some other webmasters agree to do link exchanges because I have a pagerank.
Pagerank is simply a way to see how popular a site is in terms of the amount of sites linking to it and no direct link to SERPS.
To get decent rankings it’s simply a case of good content and links from/to relevant sites, obviously there is more to SEO than just that but thats the basic foundations of attaining good rankings IMO.

relevance of content on the site your linking to is most important. The better the site the better your backlink will be.

Watched a video from google not long ago and the host said right there that pr means nothing now days, you can have a pr5 site with no relevant content and link to them and not go anywhere fast but link to a pr 0 site that has tons of relevant content and your good to go. Well that was months ago but as we all know google is fickle and a mystery in many ways.

My seo has always told me that the great myth is that pagerank actually means something as far as getting a site ranked well in google. Over the last few years i have started to believe him because i see so many high pr sites not being able to rank well for tough keywords, then he takes the client on and gets the sites up fast with low pr but very high relevency links.