Skimming the heights of Google’s page rank is not a strict criterion any more. Your blog’s success reflects upon many aspects. More importantly past norms set the standards of comparison of this success according to your blog’s position in Google’s toolbar and page rank stats. However, Google has published recently that aspects other than Page rank position need more attention and you should rely on these aspects.
Google Page Rank past its prime
It is stark but the truth nevertheless. Google Page Rank was the algorithm that was developed during the early stages of Google’s inception. However, it has been through so many augmentations since then, that the conditions of the early algorithm are all but gone in the modifications.
Logic behind Page Rank
Although, the importance has waned over time, Google Page rank continues to evaluate the sites and pages based on simple logic and formula. The results score in numeric values from one to ten. The scores are displayed on Google’s toolbar. In this situation, a score of zero indicates that Google has your blog on their radar but you do not have work enough to get in the game.
A score of five and above is for highly popular sites. N/A on the other hand might mean you have no sufficient content for the algorithm to evaluate you. The concept of Google’s page rank now has many contenders, what with various new evaluation techniques applied by popular search engines. These techniques sift through the horde to reach the most popular sites in a shorter time and a more accurate process.
Elements that you should focus on instead
Instead of focusing all your efforts in aiming a high point in Google’s page rank, you should focus on your blog’s success defining elements:
- Your blog’s bounce rate is the number of visitors that wandered off after a visit to your blog. The rate can also consider visitors who might have just entered the landing page and left without surfing on to any other pages.
- Your blog’s rate of conversion of random visitors in to subscribers is another of the defining elements that point towards your success.
- You blog's click through rate which focuses on just how many clicks your page garners for each time that it comes up on the popular search engine lists.
The focus of your blogging technique should center on developing these elements to secure more visitors and ultimately, subscribers.
Do you have a plan?
Plan you game and no matter how clichéd but set a target. Now polish your optimization. Assess whether you are using keywords that target a higher traffic but fall short in ranking. Rather, use keywords with a higher-ranking possibility and they will more likely get you a more inclined traffic group. This is more profitable for conversion and sales.
Linking back is a sure shot success technique for blogs. Even for page rank, this is an evaluation criterion. Collecting back-links from popular niche blogs and sites requires work. However, the technique is the ultimate for search engine crawlers to mark your blog higher in search lists. Guest posts, comments, and mutual linking are just some of the ways that you can set the ball rolling.
Do not stress over Google Page Rank
The consensus is, of all the metrics for blog evaluation, Google’s page rank is the easiest to crack. However, the newer and more elaborate metrics will be a better option in many ways. Google updates the page rank only a handful of times in a year. This is a direct, albeit, polite indication that the search engine giant wants to tell you that you have to focus on “other” aspects more.
Back-links are important even for Page rank and definitely for the more elaborate metrics. Page rank does not consider page design or other aesthetic elements while crawling through your blog. Yet, these elements attract visitors and encourage sales. If you focus on page rank for pointers on blog evolution, you might be stumped in the facets that it ignores. Alternately, you might recede in the list of other metrics in the field.
It is not so much as you should not consider page rank; more that you should not set everything in store by it. Concentrate on the most important aspects and that will be traffic and conversion. SEO does not need to be too hard. In fact, the simple techniques have a much higher chance of working out.
I completely i agree with your point. I have many websites which doesn’t have no page rank which got some excellent SERP for the competitive keywords.
Forget page rank and concentrate on
visitor length
Top exit pages
website usability
CTR
loading time
…
Thilak you have a good point. As far as you can manage to get your site ranked for potential keywords, you don’t have to worry about PR.
That is quite true. Anyways, check out our Elegant Themes giveaway contest. You guys ought to be part of this.
When i started blogging , then only i was worried about such things like alexa ranking , pagerank etc . But after reading this type of articles my mind was clear that i have to concentrate on what i am sharing , they way i am sharing and how much i am sharing.
And yes PR updates few times a year.So of course we have to focus on other aspects much.
Informative article.Thanks for sharing.
Its so unavoidable and irresistible that we are obsessed by these numbers when we are newbies. I too was like that. But later on we will realize the fact.
IMO, it doesnt matter whether your site has no pagerank as long as its doing well on the search engines. Although it feels good to have PR for your sites. 🙂 PR is not merely the basis of how your business generates ROI.
You’re right Herbert. There is only very little correlation between PR and ROI of a website. That little correlation comes from companies that keep PR as one of the metrics to weigh a site.
I do have to say that I’ve never really been too bothered about PageRank, the importance of how long and how many pages are viewed outweighs the idea of a number for a ranking system, that not many people really bother with these days 😉
Karen, I feel that the awareness is picking up. The obsession is slowing disappearing, except for some newbies.
I agree that you shouldn’t obsess over your PageRank score, and instead focus on providing valuable content and watching your web analytics for trends. Build great content, promote it, engage with your audience, devote time to SEM, and do all of the other things you’re “supposed” to do, and your site will rise in search rankings.
(The problem is that there are still directories, guest blogging services and a number of other online resources that determine the value of your site based entirely on its PageRank. Hopefully, these sites will begin to take an expanded view of relevancy and value.)
Melissa yes, that a sad thing that most directories and ad agencies still put a lot of weight on PR. The point is, even if you don’t do anything for a blog in terms of SEO, it will slowly gain PR over the time. I hope things will change. Although I do not insist on completely ignoring PR!
Hi Jane,
I agree with you. The game has changed. Google page rank is not the be-all anymore.
I’ve visited blogs with zero page ranks, some even N/A but with great interaction among commenters.
From what I’ve noticed, Social Media is the thing now. Google+ is now a factor in affecting your algorithm.
I also agree with Melissa. Focus on providing great content, promote and engage with your readers.
Thanks for this info. Have a nice day!
Yes Theresa, PR is not be-all certainly! We have many more stats and numbers that become equally important and get noticed by the others.
You calmed me)thank you. Because I have been worrying about page rank, and was not always sure that I understand everything in an appropriate way. I had the same thing as Theresa had. I was visiting different sites and blogs where a great number of comments was, but the page rank was juzt zero. And now after your explanation, I understood that it wasn’t a problem
Jeanie, it so natural for everyone to get a hype about PR. Glad that you settled!
Jane,
Agreed! PR is overated. Sure it still may have some bearing… all other things being equal.
But the fact of the matter is that other things often are not equal.
It is far better to shot for relevancy over PR. Let your backlinks work to build your authority rather than just simple PR being “the metric”
Sure Aaron. By popular search engine lists, I mean a list of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. The CTR means, the ratio of the number of times your links came up on search results (on those popular search engines) to the number of times they actually got clicked by a user!
Hope you got it. If not, let me know, I’ll try harder 😉
PR is important but only PR can’t give your higher ranking and traffic, there are many other factors too usually people don’t think about them.
Maybe I am nuts, but I still spend a lot of my time focusing on PageRank. I look at it a little differently than most people do though. I think Google is using a modified version of Topic Sensitive PageRank as part of their ranking algorithm. So, in my mind it is still pretty important. And I believe that PageRank is a great measurement of how much overall authority a website has. So, getting more of it is a good thing.
Ted, Google is using a lot of “behind the screens” stuff. So there’s nothing we can do by worrying on PR.
You’re totally correct. PageRank has been pretty useless for years, except for those who mine the ‘Fool’s Gold.’ As a ranking factor, it seems it’s not in the top anymore.
Nicely put, Google Pagerank is not out of the equation but still overrated. There are many other important factor like bounce rate to take care of.
Yes Sanjeev, we cannot take it out of the equation. But obsession is useless.
Thanks for your post. I have been wondering about my page rank, it has been at 2 for a while and really hard to increase it despite doing more SEO. Your information is helpful.
I completely agree. If you spend all your time trying to figure out how to get more pagerank, you will drive yourself crazy. We’re in the age where trying to outsmart Google is a waste of time. Now, if you want to rank high and get lots of traffic, you’re better off learning about how to market. It will keep traffic coming from different sources, and will future-proof you from any more Panda updates.
Lionel that’s a good point about concentrating on blog marketing instead of these numbers. The more we market and promote, the more backlinks are “casually” got. This will lead to better PR, without having to be obsessed about it! Coz all the social media shares count as backlinks as well.
I saw another article on this the other day and its really opened my eyes. I was worrying myself as I’m a new website owner my new site has PR 0 and I was thinking until there was an update and I might jump up a bit, I wouldn’t be able to rank for my target market. As a layman I’d always thought pagerank = authority and that in a serp that when 2 similar sites are returned the one with the higher PR returned first. Essentially, as I’m still learning all the time, its content, backlinks, bounce rate, pagerank in that order whilst ensuring an aesthetically pleasing website in order to engage your visitor which will win the day. I’m working on content daily!
Yes, it is a sad fact that still a lot of people compare the authority (or usefulness) of a site with the Pagerank. Although having a good pagerank is a good sign, it need not equate directly to the authority of a site.
PR is yesterday’s Klout score. Neither should be a destination and both can be just another tool to help measure ROI.
This is a really interesting article, i have been struggling to understand page rank as my site has stayed at PR1 for over a year despite having a lot more links now and appearing higher in search results than similar sites with a higher PR. I will stop worrying so much now!
Rich glad that I could be of help. It is so sad that bloggers easily get frustrated over low PRs. Blogging is already hard work and most of the times frustrating (when you have to wait long to get expected results). So why add to the frustration?
Page rank is really important because of you being knock down by google then your site will be like a trash, it’s like when people search for the keyword it will not show up. And right now google are making sure that your site will also be valuable to the their users. In fact they will tag as spam for those site who only focused on promoting a particular product. And that’s happening right now. That’s why instead of having a single site with one product or infiormation, it’s recommended to have a site that has a multiple niche.
I have been kind of obsessing over rank and to learn that I shouldn’t worry about it much is a relief. I am going to start focusing more on marketing and getting more people to visit. Thanks for this.
I agree with you, page rank is important but there are lots of things that is needed to optimized than to focus on page rank. For me, its better to improve the bounce rate, traffic, and the SERP.
Hi Jane..I agree 100% with you. I found many sites which have 0 PR or some has N/A PR. Still these sites comes in top 10 SERP resuluts. I also agree with others.
People should worry about their traffic and the SEO. Page rank is just another metric.
Pagerank is not as important as it used to be and you can easily outrank a site in search results with a lower ranked page or site. But, a high ranked pr site attracts advertisers much more than any kind of traffic rank. Google frowns upon selling links for the purpose of passing rank, but it happens all the time. They really haven’t come up with an auto system of detecting link sellers, and they are everywhere. They try, but so far they aren’t that good at it. They do catch a few. So I think some of the link peddlers still seek pagerank for the sole purpose of selling them perhaps.
I agree that page rank is a bit old-fashioned notion, but we shouldn’t forget about even for a second. Surely and obviously that we need to concentrate on link as this is the essential process of any site promotion. Then content is also important and so on. Page ranks turns out to be perfect if you work with your site in a proper way.
google PR is hardly accurate. it’s the old google algorithm, they way they used to calculate page’s rating a few years ago.
it’s a good indication for where you stand, but google actual search result are base on a different PR engine.
I also agree that PR is not like the most important think to think about but still in my job I am requested to find Sites with high PR. I know that this is not so accurate but still I need it:(
Thanks for this article.In my Internet marketing experience of 2 years I have seen many websites ranking high in SERPs with 2 or even 0 PR .PR as a tool has been outdated a long time but giving importance to it it has just become like a bad habit of SEO practitioners which is difficult to give up
Well said Hamza! It’s a bad habit and an addiction to most SEO practitioners and bloggers who can’t resist the urge to always check the green toolbar.
As people who go into the online business increase, SEO seems to be more and more complicated. The fact is, SEO hasn’t changed much. As competition increases the tasks involved in SEO may have probably increased as well. However, the fundamentals are the same.
Yeah as of now my page rank is not showing up but I hope to achieve one in the future. This post reminds me not to stress over it though and for that I thank you.
Riya, that’s my point. There are many other factors that “influence” or affect the ROI of our website, more than PR. So we should be concentrating more on them!
Thanks for highlighting the facts and yes, many sites with 0 or na PR still ranks above authority sites.
I still look at PR when it comes to other sites.
You can’t deny that it is still better to have your link on a page with some pr than on a page without pr.
But for my own web property I haven’t cared much about PR. Only SERP, bounce rate and ultimately conversion rate.
But if you want to sell your site it is still good for the value of your site to have high PR.
Great article , Jane.
This is so true. What I been seeing out on the web is that many sites are doing well in every other area(Including financial) yet, they do not have high PR.
Many sites I find on page (1) for great keywords, have PR O.
Hi Jane!
I agree with you on the point that Google page rank is not that important as it used to be. Now there’re other moments we should take into consideration (which you mentioned). But nevertheless page rank is still a considerable measure of your blog’s success. Thus I’m sure that you shouldn’t neglect it.
Google said that it check more than 100things to provide the search result. Things like title, keywords, server speed etc. And i believe page rank is one of those things. If this is not the case then why Google not pull out page rank? Why don’t it make everything to zero? Why there is still page rank update?
I agree that we should now be worry about page rank. nice share.
I needed to read that about GPR I am always stressing about my page rank getting better. I thought that was kind of the gold standard as to what the worth of your website was. Now, I am concentrating on better SEO and great content to drive more targeted traffic. I have a health & wellness coupon site that has had the same page rank for over 2 years now, but I make a good living off of it. I was told that Google just does not rank affiliate websites highly Anyway, you have given me a different perspective on this and now I have more time to stress about other things LOL! Thanks for the good read!
Hi Jane,
I generally ignore PR of a blog unless that’s for link building strategy. What’s the point if you have a site with PR5 or above but no traffic? I have seen some of the sites with high page rank but not rank on the Google for specific keyword.
I will be happy to receive significant amount of traffic that convert on my site.
Cheers,
Ming
Indeed, PR should not be given too much importance. All that matters is the traffic and the keyword rankings of your website/blog in SERP. Having a PR (Page Rank) won’t generate leads and sales for your business. The two most important things you should concentrate on are the Traffic and Keyword rankings. If you focus more on improving your keyword rankings in Google search engine, automatically you will notice a rise in the leads and sales of your business. Optimizing your website for search engines will help you get long term benefits which cannot be fulfilled by PR or any other marketing strategies.
You will definitely see more traffic if you know what you are doing with a higher pagerank. So there is some attraction going on. Pagerank certainly isn’t dead, and you will find a lot of people and sites that follow it. A lot of people that don’t care about it are not familiar with it. Others say it’s no big deal when they drop in pagerank. But, the moment they are rewarded with more they are praising it. Go figure it’s a no win scenario.
Agreed 100% instead of worrying about PR if we do concentrate on rest of the thing like-content, traffic, visitors, promotion etc. then we can able achieve our desired SERP.
Thanks a lot for this interesting explaination.
One more thing if you are saying we shouldn’t worry about google pagerank, then one might assume that we shouldn’t worry about alexa traffic rank(the worst system in the industry) or compete rank, or analytics, etc. If Google pagerank should be tossed out and forgotten then so many other too right? I am not a big fan of any of them, but I do follow them. I think we should keep an eye on them because they are the big trends right now. Until things change we should value to some extent. If your site is new or young it may not matter so much. But, a domain that has been around awhile pagerank is definitely something to weigh in on. If you don’t think Google pagreank matters at all then you better do some reading and research at least as of todays world.
I agree .. a domain that has been around a while with good pagerank is definitely holds some authority.
If you were guest posting would you choose the blog with PR 1 or PR5? If you say PR1 I would be seriously re-evaluating your business.
I agree you shouldn’t fret about Google Page Rank tomuch. Google PageRank is sufficient to website rankings everyone knows it, but with algorithm changes like Google Panda; I believe website owners should concentrate on web content and relevence to the online user. Because this is great way to have the best possible website ratings from a range of excellent rating indicators like alexa, SEO tools and Google PageRank.
I remember the days when PR was highly important, now most people started to realized there is nothing special about PR value and the only thing that matter is SERPs position, therefore traffic. But still, some people will consider PR very important, especially when buying or selling small websites.
Google page rank was always important and it is still important but now it is some what a well known fact that Google page rank does not affect on your income stream. If you can earn $500 form your blog in a month and your page rank is 4 so if your page rank goes down from 4 to 2 then it will not affect on your earnings so you will keep earning about $500.
And it also does not affect your ranking in search engines.
Interesting that you are speaking as though no one takes Page Rank seriously (comment above)… I think most people still view it as important! Are you drawing a distinction between before and after Panda? Page Rank still means something and it does have tangible effects. Don’t make it your main focus of course, that would be an insanely unbalanced approach!
yes, SERP is the first priority. No use have PR6 or 7, but just showing in the 3rd page for keyword that we want
I don’t agree with bounce rate. The blog’s bounce rate is always higher than other sites because most of your visitors are returning visitor. They just read your new post and leave.
Hi Jane, nice post from you 🙂
I agree with you that to a specific blog, the PR number is not as important as the bounce rate, the subscription rate and other statistics. Because they’re the direct answer to how effective our blogs are working! We’re here to communicate with people not Google.
But I also believe that Google PR has its stand in some ways. I’m now in SEO and the question of whether PR is a valuable aspect in competition analysis or not is still flying around. Me personally, I don’t put much attention on it nowadays 🙂
Thanks again for sharing Jane, have a nice day!
Duy.
As far as SEO is concerned, yes PR is still valid. It is one of those important metrics that tells a websites SEO and backlink status. But it surely is not a way to “judge” how well a blog is doing or how good is the quality of the content or how authoritative the website is!
See everything I read about pagerank says you will gain more traffic. I have yet to see it myself. I am hoping that I get better PR for better status and more profits. PR can’t hurt, however I agree that you shouldn’t focus all efforts on it either. Keep writing quality content and the traffic will come.
It’s all about blogging and keeping fresh content. Google loves blogs. In my opinion far more than static pages. Smart blogging and focus on back links is key. Page rank is nice, but as you point out not that important any more. Great post!
Doug
Hey Jane,
I agree 100% that page rank has passed its prime. Now its all about SERPs position if you are looking for organic traffic from search engines.
I think that there are so many bloggers and webmaster who put too mcuh wight on PR. An indication of that is the fact that PR a big factor when people buy and sell websites.
So you are absolutely right in saying that the focus should be on more important aspects of your blog.
Page Rank seems not so important nowadays, I heard Google is not updating the page rank anymore and bounce rate on blogs is often higher, thats no problem
I’d have to agree, PageRank is at best an outdated way to gauge how well a site should rank, Matt Cutts has repeatedly said that it shouldn’t be used as a gauge of the quality or reputation of a website and to back this up the PageRank indicator has been mostly hidden in the Google toolbar.
Hopefully Google will move away from linking altogether as a ranking factor sometime in the distant future… that would be nice… I’d rather spend time creating awesome content to be honest!
Authority and trust are the new pagerank in my opinion. Google has so many other factors to dtermine rankings, that PR is not important any more. At least thats what my experience shows.
Jasmin
True indeed. When I check out competition on my sites I regularly see page rank 0 sites that are a few years old coming quite highly placed.
Quite true. Also, the page rank we see in the toolbar isn’t updated that often. The “Real” page rank can be something different. I have seen some PR 0 sites doing well.
I have ranked many sites in position 1 on page 1 that have multiple sites with page rank below it. All that is required is good on page SEO and a steady, natural looking, backlink building routine.
There are certainly a lot of details like that to take into consideration. That is a great point to bring up. I offer the thoughts above as general inspiration but clearly there are questions like the one you bring up where the most important thing will be working in honest good faith. I don?t know if best practices have emerged around things like that, but I am sure that your job is clearly identified as a fair game.
True indeed, I heard Google is not updating the page rank anymore, I’d rather spend time creating awesome content to be honest ! lot of details like that to take into consideration.
Yeah , Nowadays , Pagerank doesn’t have much importance ! And day by day , bloggers are becoming more concentrated to other factors that you have mentioned in the post !
Thanks for not treating PR like its the holy grail. I agree too many people get obsessed with it. It has little value in many way. Is Google going to update their old formula?
I am not sure about this one… I have to disagree here…
When a blog gets good PR it can earn more money… For example if you have a PR 6 blog you can sell links on that page for a nice profit…
Look at Andy Baileys PR 6 Comluv.com. He sells text links and makes good money from this. To say he shouldn’t care about PR is crazy.. That’s his income.. I do the same on my blogs.
you are right,,,pagerank is not that important,,,
eg- my blog only has 5 backlinks ,,according to alexa,,,and not a single backlink when checked in google,,,but my pr is 3,,i acheived it by my continouus research,,but i dont rank in google,,as u,,,coz i dont have backlinks………
so guys..pagerank dosent matter
I think people enjoy shooting for a metric – like pagerank – because it feels tangible. It is hard to let go of the metric without something to replace it. I think bounce rate is an excellent suggestion of something else to focus on.
I agree with important points. I emphasis on blog’s bounce rate and conversion rate. I focus on unique, qualitative and userfriendly content. I try to give what visitors want to know from my blog and try to get their reviews.
Wait. N/A in PR but #1 in search engine = will increase your PR, am I wrong?