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.