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View Full Version : Why Page Rank Is Still Important.


Catherine_WebsitesUK
10th January 2010, 11:39
Note - I have been reading all your discussions about Page Rank, and just wanted to post in layman's terms what it actually is, what it does etc. Here's something I wrote, would love to hear your opinions :)

So you think Page Rank = nothing eh?
First of all let’s take a look at exactly what Page Rank is.
Page Rank is an indication of how many good quality incoming links you have to your website, combined with the amount of traffic that regularly visits your site.
When Google assess where your website will appear in the search engine results, they look into a number of aspects (all they will officially tell us is that there are over 200 of them). One of these aspects is the popularity and relevancy of your site.
The whole thing about on-page optimisation is the ability to prove that your website is relevant to the search term you have selected. The use of keywords on your pages, in titles and headers etc is in order to back up your claims of relevancy. Hence, if you have over used a keyword on your page it will be seen as spam, but if you under use the keyword, your page will not be seen as relevant to your topic.
The next stage of optimizing your website is to build a bank of incoming links to your site. A few things are taken into consideration when building these links:
· The text which is used as the actual link to your page,
· The popularity and Page Rank of the website linking to you
· The Relevancy of the linking site to your own.
So, in order to build good links to your website you need to look for sites which are about a similar topic to your own, have a good Page Rank – or are highly popular themselves and then request that the owners of these websites link back to yours using the text which you provide, or at least including your main keywords in the actual link.
So, as you can see, Page Rank is an important factor when choosing sites to link back to you.
Page rank is Google’s way of scoring a website on its overall popularity and traffic. Each website is judged for its popularity and given a score, this score is then used to assess websites which are linked to each other. A higher scoring website gives a bigger vote to the sites it is linking to than a lower scoring website. For example, a link to your home page from Twitter, with a PR of 9, automatically pushed my website up to PR 2, just by itself, but if a website with a PR of 1 links to my site, I will need 10 – 20+ of these in order to achieve PR2.
You can achieve a high search engine listing by getting thousands of PR1 sites linking back to you, or by getting a few hundred PR4+.
This can also be a double edged sword, as Google could see a few thousand poor links to your site and think you’ve been out there spamming the world.
PR matters – think about it!

bluezone101
10th January 2010, 16:36
PR measures link popularity only (quantity and not quality), and has no DIRECT influence on SERPS.

Catherine_WebsitesUK
11th January 2010, 16:09
You are correct, it does not have a direct influence on your SERP, however, the number of high quality incoming links leading to your website does.

FireFleur
11th January 2010, 16:17
PageRank does have a direct influence on SERPs, I think you are looking for a word like 'small': the influence is small but it is still direct.

PageRank is a factor in the SERPs, a PageRank of absolute zero would probably never enter the SERPs no matter the page content, pages generally have to be linked to be in the Google Search Engine Index.

Catherine_WebsitesUK
11th January 2010, 16:35
small is a good word :D

fisicx
11th January 2010, 16:42
small is a good word :D
Incorrect. I had a page that poorly ranked. I got one inbound link from a respected and popular and I leapt to page 1.

Try to rank well for a competitive keyword without inbound links and you will fail.

Catherine_WebsitesUK
11th January 2010, 17:01
For example, a link to your home page from Twitter, with a PR of 9, automatically pushed my website up to PR 2, just by itself, but if a website with a PR of 1 links to my site, I will need 10 – 20+ of these in order to achieve PR2.


I said this...

mickeyy
13th January 2010, 08:07
Visible Toolbar PR is probably not too useful. However, we'll need to assume that Google still has an Internal PR system that is important. Google builds a huge relational date set on a URL before deciding how to rank it. Therefore a higher PR does not necessarily mean better rankings.

mattsaw
13th January 2010, 08:20
For example, a link to your home page from Twitter, with a PR of 9, automatically pushed my website up to PR 2, just by itself, but if a website with a PR of 1 links to my site, I will need 10 – 20+ of these in order to achieve PR2.

You had a link from the homepage of Twitter?

Catherine_WebsitesUK
13th January 2010, 08:28
From MY home page, not THE home page :D

mattsaw
13th January 2010, 08:34
From MY home page, not THE home page :D

I was just wondering, as Twitter profile links are nofollowed so they won't be passing any PR.....

fisicx
13th January 2010, 08:37
From MY home page, not THE home page :D
Your twitter home page has PR9?

In any case the topic is discussing PageRank (part of the google algo) but you then use PR which is short for Toolbar PageRank which isn't part of the algo.

PageRank is a ranking signal, Toolbar PageRank isn't.

Catherine_WebsitesUK
13th January 2010, 12:57
There is a lot of confusion, i find, over web related terms - being a Copy Writer, when someone first mentioned PR to me, I naturally thought of Publicity, which is sort of very similar to PageRank. Different communities will use different terminology for different things. We do need a way to moderate it and everything else related to website design, even if just for the sake of communicating more efficiently with each other.

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Twitter does use nofollow links (snippet from my twitter profile page) and I did have other incoming links (around 5 Page Rank 0-1) pointing at this site at the time, but before creating my twitter profile, the site had a PR (sorry - it's quicker than typing PageRank!) of 1 and a few days later it went up to 2, not saying that twitter was solely responsible for this fact, but it definately contributed, hence, in my opinion, makes it worth doing. :)

fisicx
13th January 2010, 13:40
This is the whole point. PageRank is NOT the same thing as the PR number you get on your toolbar.

To say you have PR2 means nothing. Not one iota. Your actual PageRank is a secret. Nobody outside oF Google knows what it is. PageRank is used to detrmine your ranking. Toolbar PR is just a bit of fluff. The fact that one page on your site went up to PR2 is irrelevant, you can get this just by doing some internal linking.

awebapart.com
13th January 2010, 15:03
The public google toolbar pagerank is an updated every few months (therefore potentially seriously out of date) approximation of what google uses internally as pagerank. Internally google uses a more realtime, continually changing, and more precise (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/) pagerank variable.

But although different, they are still related, and more closely related at the time of a new public google toolbar pagerank update.

Whilst I say that google's internal pagerank is more realtime, it still cannot be completely up-to-date since it is dependent upon recursively backtracking through many linked pages, and can therefore be only as up to date as the most recent time google visited those pages, or the most recent time internal pageranks were updated for those pages. So even internally, google is dealing with a past version of a page's pagerank (though more recent than the public google toolbar pagerank).

This recent pagerank thread discusses what pagerank is used for:

Pagerank what is it for? (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=138733)

Pagerank should not be confused with SERPs (search engine results page), search engine positions, etc which are about how high your site is listed on search engines for particular searches. It is easy to get confused with this since other terms for this include the word rank, like search engine rankings.

mattsaw
13th January 2010, 17:01
Twitter does use nofollow links (snippet from my twitter profile page) and I did have other incoming links (around 5 Page Rank 0-1) pointing at this site at the time, but before creating my twitter profile, the site had a PR (sorry - it's quicker than typing PageRank!) of 1 and a few days later it went up to 2, not saying that twitter was solely responsible for this fact, but it definately contributed, hence, in my opinion, makes it worth doing. :)

Nope, it definately didn't.

David Morson
14th January 2010, 10:47
Page rank does have an effect on the popularity and traffic of one's site as ihve experienced in the case of militarydirectory.net that good PR helps in getting quality and more related traffic to your site.