I used to be obsessed with Google Pagerank – constantly checking my sites to see if they’ve been upgraded, using SEO tools to analyse predicted future Pageranks and researching how long it had been since the last update and when we were due for the next.
But how reliable is Pagerank really? Please excuse my language but I find it to be f**king useless. The reason I’m just mentioning this is because, after months, Google seems to have thrown out some page rank around the web. But it’s so inconclusive. Some of my websites that are attracting ten times the amount of traffic as others are getting half the page rank credit and some sites that I’ve done no SEO on are getting an initial rating of 3 or 4.
How is that a useful guide to Google’s measure of your site’s importance? A lot of professional SEOs (which I far from claim myself to be) will probably mention that they’ve never trusted Pagerank, whereas some people swear by it.
But for me, I’m sick of it. It gets updated now about twice a year and is so vague it’s useless. I’m sticking to Analytics!
Pagerank exists now as a metric for people selling text links for PR, to be honest. There’s certainly a positive correlation between PR and position in the search results but it’s by no means absolute.
I guess the fundamental question here is what measures a website’s importance? Number of links or amount of traffic? The latter Google can only measure in terms of clickthroughs from results pages and Analytics, which only covers so much of the web. For the time being at least, the former will prevail.
I have seen many people claiming that they don’t care PR anymore and it is nothing else than a green bar. Believe me, I have seen same people working on their link building campaigns many hour a day and hiring other people. It is not less than a craze.
Leonardo, we do link building not to gain PR only but there are many more reasons to do that. I do it for driving traffic and to share my thoughts and pages with friends. Anyways, I don’t care about PR, although I was crazy in beginning.
I am more than happy to ignore PR for all my sites and thanks for suggesting to ignore it. I have read a lot of blog suggesting the same and I think this is not a craze anymore.
I like your language and it is even more than that. I think it is nothing but only the calculation of your backlinks so how it can drive traffic to a site? For traffic we need high rankings and that is not related to PR at all. So I am not afraid of it nor I am concerned.
I am not going to agree that PR is not significant. We do hardwork to attain good rankings and we do so via link building and anchor text so how PR is not important. I don’t say that PR is the basic of all the SEO but it has its importance.
A few months ago, I just ignored that and then later all my rankings were ruined. I do take care of PR now.
I always worry about my ranking. I cant help it.
Not currently, but with a bit of work this is possible as well.