Does Your Site’s Google PageRank Value Matter?

The Short & Sweet About PageRank Determining the Success of a Site

Why do so many people worry about their Google PageRank? Here’s my professional, simple and brief “take” on PageRank:

Often, new clients ask me “Claudia, does my website’s PageRank matter? What can I do to get a higher PR number?”

My answer? I tell them that to be honest, I don’t care very much at all about a site’s PageRank value, as PR really DOES NOT ensure a site’s success either traffic-wise or profitability-wise. Many years ago yes indeed, the PageRank number (value) mattered, but that was in the olden days of search engines ranking algorithms.

In the early internet days, PR importance was crucially important to a website’s organic search engine ranking, but over the years many other relevancy pieces to the algorithms, such as domain age, domain name, anchor text, and keyword word to content relationships, have come into play. If a client needs even more convincing that PR really could concern me less, I can add that a high PageRank does NOT GUARANTEE a high search ranking for any particular term. Honest!

What matters nowadays, and here are just two of the many factors, are things like keyword focused quality content that provides good information to the visitor who lands on that page; and keyword focused anchor text for internal hyperlinks in the site. Things like these are now much more important to the overall organic search engine ranking positions of a site (or even each page on the site), rather than whether a link is sitting on a high PageRank page, or how many keywords you’ve got sitting on a page, or …

I’ll put it another way … those brainy folks behind locked doors at Google and the other SEs are devising more and more complex mathematical equations that determine the importance of a website and how that site will rank versus other websites in the same niche. And those algorithmic equations are SECRET.

Here’s a bit of PageRank info taken from a Google webpage Technology Overview:

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

• PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
• PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

Yes, PageRank is somewhat important, but it is nowhere near as important as it once was. The “olden days” of PageRank importance determining a site’s success versus failure are long gone. A well coded website that contains lots of quality well-written keyword focused content, and that has had proper search engine optimization attention is the ultimate goal.

Do you have concerns about your website? Did you know I gladly offer a Complimentary 30-Minute Consultation? Contact me and let’s chat about improving everything we can about your website so you can be more successful in your online marketing endeavors.