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Do Not Worry About PageRank

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer it correctly.

For many years Google pagerank was the sought out factor for many people diving into search engine optimization. Over the years it has been severely abused as people seek out science project like marketing campaigns only to increase page rank. News flash, rankings alone don’t grow a business and the search engines are really starting to evolve and change the way that they rank websites. They are tweaking and modifying search engines to only reward those who take a natural approach to building their business. An approach that builds over time with heavy branding and marketing elements rather than pouncing on loop holes to achieve rankings in search engines. Internet marketing company HubSpot based out of Boston MA had this to say about Google page rank: “Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.”

Basically what HubSpot is saying is that businesses and websites should be focusing on building their brand and their business and not worrying about what the Google pagerank of their website is. At the end of the day page rank does not offer any value. You can’t track where your page rank comes from or why it is even there. It has almost become a distraction for website owners that have lost focus on what it really means to market your business online. Even Google has removed any mention of pagerank from their guidelines.

A recent Q&A session on one of Google’s forums had this to say:
“Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

When Google comes out and says it than you better believe that it is true in every possible way. You can read more about Google’s view point on page rank on the Google webmaster forum. I given touched on the subject of Google PageRank sculpting as a waste of time a few months ago as well.

6 Responses to “Do Not Worry About PageRank”

  • matt says:
    February 23, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    I have to disagree with notion of not worrying about PageRank. I believe PageRank is still a huge aspect to getting noticed in search results.

    Example: I own an apartment rental website and currently have a PageRank of “0″. With all other SEO strategies and keywords in place, my site is still sitting at page #23 when people search “Des Moines Apartments.” This kills my ability to get heavy traffic, and am forced to use AdWords to pay for traffic. Here is my site for reference.

    You are correct about focusing on your business and brand to naturally gain page rank. My issue seems to be getting those natural links, but that’s what PageRank is about correct? No love from others typically means no love from search engines.

  • Zander Chance says:
    February 23, 2010 at 7:24 pm

    Yes, you’re absolutely right that PR has no bearing from an SEO point of view.. But if you’re on the dark side of the fence and selling paid links, PR means everything.

    When one of our sites got a PR5 in the last update, our Inbox just started getting flooded with solicitations.. In fact, that’s how we found out about the PR update!

  • Daniel Shlifer says:
    February 23, 2010 at 9:37 pm

    It is amazing how many times we see that (especially in the world of Inbound Marketing), web site owners find a way to learn enough to shoot themselves in the foot. I think the metaphor would be they take just enough rope to hang themselves. Not too sure about that.

    I couldn’t agree more with what are you are advising in this new blog post. You have given good advice about what to pay attention to, and what not to pay attention to.

    Content is king and best business and web site practices will always help move a site and it’s traffic forward.

    Good job!

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    February 24, 2010 at 12:42 pm

    Hi Matt,
    Thanks for reading and your comment, Pagerank is a factor that personally don’t look at and make online marketing decisions around…

    Hi Daniel,
    I agree that content is indeed king! :)

  • Ephricon says:
    February 28, 2010 at 10:43 am

    @Zander yeah PR is everything if youre selling links, and even when operating directories.

    Here’s a post regarding using cache date to somehow measure the importance of a domain/page.

    http://www.seobook.com/archives/001985.shtml

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    February 28, 2010 at 11:48 am

    Hi Ephricon,
    Thanks for reading and sharing the other valuable post with our readers!

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