Google Page Rank: Is It Important To You And Your Blog?
Posted by
eli
on 1/04/10• Categorized as Consulting
On December 31, 2009 or 4 days ago, Google has updated the page ranks. It seems that the update is good for the New Year 2010. 
Many bloggers put too much importance on their blogs’ page rank (PR) from Google.
In addition, most webmasters always anticipate the next Google PR update, as if it is the only thing that matters.
What is Page Rank?
Page rank is an indicator of the value of an individual page in your blog or site. It is not a measure of your blog’s rank or popularity, but of a page.
To determine your page rank, Google interprets a link from other page or pages, for example Page 1 of your friend’s blog to Page 2 of your blog as a vote of popularity or importance, by Page 1, for page 2.
So, the more pages from other blogs linking to your blog’s page, the more votes your page receives. In assigning a PR, Google also looks at the page or pages that link or cast the vote to your particular page, the more important the page or pages are (high PR), the more important your page becomes.
This is the reason why many websites and SEO firms are selling links purportedly from PR 4-6 sites, some with prices ranging from $ 100 – $ 299 for 30 – 50 incoming links to your blog. Other bloggers are also exchanging links.
SEO Tips On How To Get A High PR
If you want your blog to have a PR, SEO “experts” would often advice for a “linking strategy.” Get links from other blogs or sites that are related to your site. Also provide links to other blogs that are useful to your visitors.
Content Is More Important Than Page Rank
Why do you want to have a page rank or a high page rank? What is your objective?
While having a page rank or a high PR maybe important, it is not necessary. What is necessary in blogging is content – useful, unique, good quality content AND traffic – a targeted visitors.
A page rank is important to Google, how it sees your page in searches, but useful content is what your visitors and readers are looking for.
Once you have good quality and updated content, then it is easy to optimize it for search engines, especially in getting rankings in search engine results page (SERP), which bring free traffic to your site.
Page Rank Removed From Google Webmaster Tools
According to Wikipedia, on October 14, 2009, Google employee Susan Moskwa confirmed that Google had removed Page Rank from its Webmaster Tools section. In her post, she said:
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on Page Rank so much; many site owners seems to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.”
Conclusion
Page Rank maybe important, but in the final analysis, for a blogger, what is more important are useful, high quality content posts and traffic. After all, that’s what blogging is all about
There is a sense of achievement when your blog PR is upgraded to a higher figure
Pagerank is the least important thing to me, i dont need it to have a succesful blog or to rank highly in search engines. Pagerank is good for one thing and thats selling links if you want to.
Page rank is just a value google assigns you. It has no reflection on how you are doing in terms of traffic (whether this is from a search engine or other sources).
Many people seem to worry about page rank, the long and short of it is, you shouldn’t.
Yes, I agree that Google PageRank is some sort of an accomplishment to a blogger and that traffic to a site is another one especially if it is coming from your target audience. By the way, PageRank is important to bloggers who do paid blogs. Many PPB (Pay Per Blog) companies and its advertisers use it as basis for getting the service of a blogger and the rates that they will pay.
Which comes first, the horse or the cart? You need page rank to rank high to get more readers, and visitors. You need readers and visitors to get more page rank.
What does puzzle me greatly are sites that have good Alexa ranking, and good page ranking from google that have very little content. The content they have isn’t updated on a regular basis, and often those pages are nothing but a yellow pages or sorts…with so many ads and banners you really can’t find anything to read.
In the last couple of weeks, I jumped from a pr3 to a pr4 which was exciting to me. What confused me was I had been steadily going down with Alexa just before that; then suddenly my Alexa numbers went up instead of down??? My blog is updated all the time. I get more comments than many pages I visit; but I don’t understand sometimes why or when things happen.
Sandy
Would love you to swing by and see what you think
@ Sandy, wow! congrats on your PR 4. That’s something and not many blogs (actually a page in your blog) have that high Google page rank. It shows the importance of your blog to Google and when the searchers “googled” the keywords that you have also on your posts, your blog or content appears on the first page of Google search engine results page (SERP).
It maybe that the blogs that you mentioned, although low in content, have many incoming links. It appears that Google algorithms which are used in giving page rank to a page give more value on how many good quality sites linking to your page. Page rank is determined by incoming links to a page on your blog, the more links your page has, the more popular, hence, the page rank.
There are many sites that are PR 3 and 4 but have low Alexa rank, with global Alexa rank in the 500,000. Please note that in Alexa, lower is better, the higher your traffic, the lower is your rank. Currently Google is No. 1 in Alexa, Yahoo! is rank No. 3.
On the other hand, there are sites with high Alexa traffic rank, say, within the Top 30,000 websites, but with NO Google page rank. This is because while Google measures a page popularity (rank), Alexa measures your traffic, determined by the number of visitors everyday who visit your site with their Alexa toolbar installed on their computers.
In your case, although your PR is 4, your Alexa global traffic rank is 93,497. Well, it’s already good, it means your blog is within the Top 94,000 websites in the world. Note that some sites have Alexa traffic rank of 8,500,000. Means they get maybe 20 visitors a day with Alexa toolbar installed on their computers.
Thanks for sharing. I visited few of your post, and its very informative. I will apply the points to my blog for increase my Alexa Page rank.
I would say page rank is an important criteria which reflects the importance of your website in Google’s eyes. These are like the votes for your site. So it is somehow cardinal trait to establish your online image.
PageRank is probably one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web.
PageRank is not simply based upon the total number of inbound links.
The basic approach of PageRank is that a document is in fact considered the more important the more other documents link to it,
but those inbound links do not count equally.
good points here about Trust now being a major factor in search engine results,
that goes with what Rand and others have been saying too.
this also settles for me the value of a natural approach to gaining backlinks and not getting a huge bunch of them,
or a large # of high pr backlinks in a short period of time – it rather undermines the Trust factor.
I do wonder what you think of bing and how Trust does/will play a role in their results.
it seems to me from a rather preliminary and cursory look at some results and comparing those to over at google and yahoo,
that bing ofter relies more on the keyword/s being the actual url,
which seems to me a rather poor way to rank sites/pages.
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