Does Google PageRank Matter?
I find it difficult to understand how topics involving the importance of Google PageRank continue to be an ongoing debate in forums. Interestingly enough, often those people claiming that PR has nothing to do with how Google determines the placement of sites in search results, are those people with low PR sites.
Google PageRank is certainly not the only factor in determining your position in the SERPs, but believing that it does not play a role in search results is simply crazy.
A Google feature that helps determine the rank of a site in our search results. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your searches. Webmaster Help Center
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. Google 101
How often does Google crawl the web? Google’s spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild our index. Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites. Webmaster Help Center
Please do not bother showing me dozens of examples of sites with low PageRank doing better in the search results than sites with higher PR. No one is saying that PageRank is the only factor. It is simply one of many factors involved.
Until Google chooses to ignore PageRank by removing it from the algorithm, it would be foolish for website owners to do so. While I do not feel it is something we should obsess over, for top 10 results, we certainly shouldn’t ignore it either.
J. Cricket Walker of CricketWalker.com
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I completely believe that Pagerank gives some implications that one site will do better than another in search engine optimization and web design in search engine results.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I think the main thing to remember here is that PageRank is part of a larger algorithm at Google and that webmaster mustn’t get obsessed simply with their PageRank score.
As you mention, there are plenty of sites getting good rankings with low PR pages so this says it all really.
As a final note it always helps to analyse websites PageRank before linking to them or accepting reciprocal link arrangements as it’s a good method of establishing whether a website has been penalized by Google.
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:07 am
If you aim at selling links on your site, a high PR certainly helps, as advertising brokers rate high on PR and/or Alexa rankings in putting their ads on.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
The relevance of toolbar PR these days, the real relevance, is as you say, pretty much limited to link exchanges. This is not to say that links don’t matter – they still seem to matter and certainly do factor into SERPs. The trick now though is more quality over quantity, and by quality this doesn’t necessarily mean high PR link exchanges. You also can get into trouble much more easily with links and not even what we would consider to be bad links either.
The movement here seems to be more toward content and not just keyword stuffing and the like but through some factors that we don’t usually look at, factors that intuitively should rank one site higher than another. Building quality content is more important than it used to be for sure.
Ken
King Cobra Poker
September 29th, 2008 at 8:11 am
YES!
I’m really glad to hear this; these days it’s as if the ‘real’ SEO’rs try to distinguish themselves by repeating over and over again that it;s not about PR …
yeah, yeah, anchor texts, all true, but they then never seem to be willing to exchange an PR5 link for a PR0 link …
cheers
October 17th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Yes !
The page rank makes all the difference. With higher page rank come status and ,what is most important, page views !
So get to work ppl and bump it up.
November 26th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Well said. Page Rank is not the only factor but it is an important one that any serious SEO should understand.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:45 am
I could not agree with you more, and I am always taken aback when people insist on arguing that pr does not matter.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:18 pm
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated. PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one….thanks
August 12th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Ive only got a pagerank of 3 but I still managed to get found at a local level. I just write unusual articles to drive traffic and this helps my page be found amongst higher PR sites.
I have no DMOZ listing yet but I think that is very important, reply? Matt.