The Truth About PageRank
In many working relationships with SEO Consultants and webmasters, I constantly hear the importance of PR. Quite frankly, I’m tired of trying to convince the Internet world that PR means nothing! Anyhow, I figure I’ll give it another attempt :). I may take shortcuts in my explanation for those of you who are already familiar with PR, but I just want to make sure that everyone can understand the big picture.
What is PR? PR stands for PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of measuring a page’s (not a site) rank. On a scale of 0 - 10, with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, everyone strove to have the PR of their pages as high as possible. So getting a link from a PR 8 page to your PR 2 page would do great wonders for it in a few weeks. With that in consideration, webmasters and link builders were offering PR 8 pages thousands of dollars a month for a link to their site. However, Google quickly caught on and decided not to give PR so much weight as it previously did because the ease of acquiring high PR links. Unfortunately, many SEO Consultants, Link Builders, and webmasters are still a little behind and haven’t quite caught on yet. I still often see many seeking links restricting their link qualifications to “PR 4 links and above.” What matters today is relevance, not PR. In fact, I don’t even incorporate a page’s PR when determining its value. Instead, I examine age, # of backlinks, type of backlinks, content, and relevancy. These are the factors that count, not that little green bar in the Google toolbar. If I find a PR 0 page to be more relevant than a PR 4 page, then I’ll certainly aim for the PR 0 page. The goal with search engines is to appear as natural as possible (that’s what it’s called “organic” or “natural” rankings, not “paid”). It doesn’t look too natural for a PR 8 page linking to a PR 3 page unless there’s good reason.
PageRank means very little today. It still contains somewhat of a summary of a page’s rank and worth, however, not enough to be taken into consideration as a page’s link value. Here’s a great article on that talks more about the decreasing value of pagerank.