COMMENTS
News to my ears! I've been focussing too much on page rank and often wondered why less optimised site rank much higher than our site.
Content remains king!
THANK YOU for posting this! I am so sick of hearing about page rank from people! I will be sharing this posting as much as I can. Good optimization and traffic to your website can only be truly effected by one thing
GOOD CONTENT, CREATED OFTEN. Dedicate yourself to your brand online and make a regular effort to connect with your customers and community and you will be rewarded with more traffic.
Thank you Mike for sharing this topic. Totally agree with Matt Nelson also on this.
Well, it's not COMPLETELY useless as a metric. It's still a pretty good and fast indicator of page's importance (even your grader uses it).
Google Page Rank has never been relevant in my book. But to give you a perfect example...My SocialSuasion.com site had not been updated since May of last year and had a page ranking of 2...a few weeks ago I changed the template and logo as I was going to start posting to it again and I now have a page rank of 4. There is 1 site linking in and the site is getting diddly squat for traffic.
As the article suggests this is always an interesting topic, and I take your point about it not being a metric that website owners should fixate on. But as a website analyzer embroiled in taking into account lots of metrics when assessing the performance of a website, I can't fail to notice that once that little green bar appears against a page, I am of the opinion that it does appear to give a page a little 'lift'. Creating inbound links to a page is contributing to that Trust Rank you referred too. And I have found when working strategically with a client when a page we want to raise more awareness too has then been optimised and had more links pointing at it and subsequently better performed, then low and behold the little green bar tends to appear not long afterwards. So, maybe not the ultimate metric but a 'guide' for site owners maybe. With regards your reference to a tweet and it doing well in the rankings I am not sure if I were to totally agree on a tweet from 'joe average' doing well in the rankings hours or a few days after it being released. Celebrity and big brand players using this platform do well and again I think its down to the popularity of people knowing who to look out for in twitter. And I bet over the average time we see that little green bar appear those tweets you might be looking at right now, might then have that little green bar creep up on them. But hey a great post, we could talk and analyse this all day. I am meeting up with Rand Fishkin in Scotland in the next few weeks and we may get into this topic at the Online Excellence event we are staging in Glasgow and come back with more thoughts.
So will HubSpot be removing it from it's Website Grader?
Relevant or not, it drives me crazy that my HubSpot ranking is far above my competitors but their Google Page rank is higher than mine by two points.
Hi Mike !
Congratulations for this article with plenty of common sense!
I attended your webinar on Inbound marketing last week and find your articles quite refreshing reading.
Gérard de Angéli
France
Thanks everyone for the support and comments.
@Brian Mathers - Read the two links to the info from Google. They removed Page Rank from their tools for a reason. The concept of page rank or link authority is useful, however the number in the little green bar (actual Page Rank) is not useful. Maybe the ONE time I could see it being useful is when a new website goes from 0 to something bigger than 0, you now have an indication that Google has taken your site out of the new site sandbox. But otherwise I do think the number in the green bar is useless. It is old, inaccurate, and does not correlate to results. PS - Tell Rand I said hello! He's a great guy and hangs at HubSpot sometimes, and joined me for an episode of HubSpot TV.
@Ben Potenza - Yes. We are working on ways to remove Page Rank from our tools and replace it with metrics that are useful and measure about the same thing Page Rank is supposed to measure.
I think that you are providing bad information:
1. You can not get any of the information google has about you in real time. This helps google keep their algorithms secret.
2. Pr on the toolbar is updated quarterly.
3. 1 link from a pr 5 put me on the front page of google. 20 links from 0s and 1s do nothing.
It still matters, google is simply purposely ambiguous.
Sam Diener
@Sam Diener - The CONCEPT of page rank is useful, but I do think that the actual number is not useful to think about or worry about. And what you should do is just try to create great content, optimize it, and promote it to build links from more websites and more authoritative websites. But tracking the publicly available page rank number is not useful.
Good to hear this Mike. I just hope it's true, cos enough of the PR madness.
Hat's off to Matt Nelson. I think you nailed it. GOOD CONTENT, CREATED OFTEN.
Every SEOer reading this article: if I were to offer you a PageRank 2 backlink or a PageRank 9 backlink, which would you prefer?
Exactly.
Still relevant dude. Yes: Slaving over PR is totally silly, I agree - but it's relevant.
how come my google toolbar still tells the PR of a particular page?
we all know it's silly, and yet who can resist the temptation of a 10 PR?
Now publicly vs. hidden page rank.... that is a totally different concept. I never said the actual publicly available page rank was what you should base your rankings off of. But you can get an idea... +- 4... ;)
Samuel Diener
(SEO GOD) .... just kidding
Mr. Volpe's blog is interesting, and reading the latest information on ranking, based on his past blogs, is a great topic to read. (Thank you, Mike!) I also truly appreciate Sam Diener's comments, and I agree completely. Even though Google says that page rank is irrelevant, until it completely disappears from the internet and becomes a thing of the very distant (so no chance that it matters) past, we still need to be cognizant of it and use anything it provides for SEO benefit (like links from highly-ranked companies). Great job on the blog. Thanks again.
This is great to know, as I was getting obsessed with trying to get our site to PR5, and was pulling out my hair trying to figure out why one of my now even more optimized pages went from PR3 to PR0. I'll stop worrying and move on.
PageRank would be a good rough metric if Google reported it in a timely manner, which, as Mike points out, they do not. Even if they did, it's a vague measure because what really matters is position in the SERPs for the keywords that are relevant to your customers and getting found because of that ranking. BTW, SEOmoz gives a good perspective on search engine ranking factors.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Nevertheless, I still quite value the number of PR value.
After hearing so many talk about PR and the importance of getting links from high PR pages, it will be hard to get a different mind set.
PR is still so important for Google.But for yahoo!, it is just like a lightless star in the sky
Not completely irrelevant as it is a simple and obvious way to judge a website generally. Still helps to build up visitor's trust. Also, I think many link building partners take PR into consideration as well. But agree that don't need focus too much on PR. It is only one of the criteria on a good website.
Mike,
Thanks for sharing this information. Sometimes it is so easy to get hung up on this number since it is put out by google we all just kind of loose our mind. You bring up some great points here that really drive this message home. I know this will be helpful for both our company and our clients on Hubspot.
The publicly available PageRank number (commonly referred to as "toolbar PageRank") is indeed a pretty useless number.
Even if it were updated reasonably frequently and consistently (it's not), it's so coarse that it loses much of it's value. There's a big difference between being at 6.0 and 6.9 -- but Google provides no indication as to where on the spectrum you are -- it just tells you "6".
In any case, great article -- agreed that we should be de-emphasizing PageRank.
Like many pieces of "information" (defined as an actionable aggregation of data), many webmasters are misusing something that Google creates for their own specific purpose. This Google purpose has almost nothing to do with those Webmaster purposes... but because it is published (early or late) then it *must* be important. Kinda like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It is not completely irrelevant to the entire universe, just largely irrelevant to webmasters... Thanks Mike! J
I'm joining this conversation late with the benefit of all the comments. I'm on the fence on this. I can read what Google writes. But, do I believe everything from Google? No. My question is: why hasn't Google simply done away with PageRank if it's meaningless? The fact it still exists alone means something. I suppose, we can continue to debate what it means. But, I'm convinced it still means something otherwise, Google would officially remove it.
Great to hear, thanks for telling us your views and I agree.
I have one of my web sites on the first page for my chosen key words, it has a zero page rank.
COULD NOT AGREE MORE! I've been tired of seeing people chase page rank for a long time now. And there are still so many who worry about it and waste tons of time focusing on it and chasing it. There are plenty of sites in top spots with 0 PR and a link is a link is a link...if it doesn't come from a PR9 but rather a PR1, you still got a link and it still counts!
Are you saying that incoming links from good pagerank sites doesn't effect the ranking in Google?
I still think pagerank is imporant for backlink purposes.
Excellent post and information. I really liked how you linked to many of your other posts that talked about Google page rank from past years and how it has evolved and changed over time.
I just talked about and linked to this post on my SEO blog at the following link:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/02/23/worry-pagerank/
Excellent post and information. I really liked how you linked to many of your other posts that talked about Google page rank from past years and how it has evolved and changed over time.
I just talked about and linked to this post on my SEO blog at the following link:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/02/23/worry-pagerank/
Excellent post and information. I really liked how you linked to many of your other posts that talked about Google page rank from past years and how it has evolved and changed over time.
I just talked about and linked to this post on my SEO blog at the following link:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/02/23/worry-pagerank/