We've actually blogged about this topic many times before. For instance, in October 2006 we wrote The Importance of Google Page Rank and November 2007 we wrote Why Did My Page Rank Decrease - FAQs, but that was years ago, and things change online and in marketing, more often than that.
Google Page Rank is a number from 0 to 10 that Google assigns each page on the internet based on how "powerful" that page is in terms of the number and quality of links coming into the page. CNN is a Page Rank 10, my mom's blog is a 1, this blog is a 6... you get the idea. Because Google reveals this number in their browser toolbar, a number of SEO tools and toolbars started to use it as a relevant metric to evealuate the "Google Juice" of a given website or web page. All of this resulted in a near obsession among most SEOers and many marketers on their own Page Rank. People used to sell links, and charge more for links from a higher Page Rank site. Google started not to like that people were focusing on this metric, and started to delay the data in the toolbar, meaning that there was a 6-9 month (or longer) delay between what Page Rank Google assigned to you and what the publicly available Page Rank was. And there were rumors and suspicions that Google no longer used Page Rank and had moved to Trust Rank, which was not available publicly but was the new version of Page Rank.
Fast forward to today, and I think Google Page Rank is a completely irrelevant metric to track, and here are 5 reasons why.
Metrics are useless unless you can track them, and you can't track Page Rank. The best approximation of your Page Rank you can get is 6-9 months old, and even then you're not sure it is correct. If you cannot accurately and frequently get new data for a metric, it is pretty much useless.
Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.
Page Rank is not relevant for real time search and social media results. Increasingly, social media conversations, real time news and status updates and other content are making their way into search results. Even though the Page Rank for a tweet or status update is 0, they still show up in results. Same thing for news releases and other content.
Page Rank is not a results metric. Typically it is best to measure things that get you real results for your business (customers and revenue) or things that directly lead to those metrics (leads). But Page Rank has nothing to do with any results - see the previous two reasons.
Even Google says Page Rank is not important. Google removed Page Rank from its webmaster tools because it is not important. Google Employee (Webmaster Tools Analyst) Susan Moskwa says "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it." And many other places Google tells you to not worry about Page Rank.
So, what should you do? It's simple... Don't worry about Page Rank. You should Get Found by creating great content, optimizing that content for search and promoting that content in social media and then convert these website visitors into leads and customers. There's a whole methodology for this stuff and even free training and certification available.
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Craig nattress 8:39 AM on January 27, 2010
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!
Matt Nelson 8:41 AM on January 27, 2010
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.
Tor Egil Ellingsen 8:47 AM on January 27, 2010
Thank you Mike for sharing this topic. Totally agree with Matt Nelson also on this.
Toni Anicic 9:00 AM on January 27, 2010
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).
Brian Mathers 9:09 AM on January 27, 2010
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.
Ben Potenza 9:12 AM on January 27, 2010
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.
Gérard de Angéli 9:33 AM on January 27, 2010
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
Mike Volpe 9:41 AM on January 27, 2010
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.
Sam Diener 9:47 AM on January 27, 2010
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
Mike Volpe 10:36 AM on January 27, 2010
@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.
cfagbata 12:15 PM on January 27, 2010
Good to hear this Mike. I just hope it's true, cos enough of the PR madness.
Jeri Hastava 12:41 PM on January 27, 2010
Hat's off to Matt Nelson. I think you nailed it. GOOD CONTENT, CREATED OFTEN.
duder 12:51 PM on January 27, 2010
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.
Sam Diener 2:57 PM on January 27, 2010
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
Jana Sheeder 5:40 PM on January 27, 2010
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.
Brian Mathers 5:51 PM on January 27, 2010
Hi Mike
Thanks for your feedback on my contribution to your post and I will definately mention you in dispatches when Rand touches down here in Bonnie Scotland on 12th Feb. I will read these article links again you provided, but Sam Diener raises some interesting points here too. I was going to ask if anyone is aware of an SEO Marketer doing some testing right now whether our green bar tells us anything. I say this because in November 2009 I launched This was a brand new domain and zero pagerank and I did my usual approach to 'fuel' this website but it didn't surface much, until in mid January the home page was given a PageRank Score of 1/10. Not a lot for a few months old site, but what I found was - now the site was ranking for certain terms with Google. Is this coincidental and I am tying my green bar myth to this or did the site start ranking because of all the other fuel injecting natural stuff I was doing - like link building for example. Its like somebody said earlier it can get a little crazy. I have enjoyed reading everyones comments, and there is nothing like a healthy debate! - I hope my tag link works in this reply so people can take a look at the Kelvin Power Tools site I refer too. Cheers
Josh 9:02 PM on January 27, 2010
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.
Colin Warwick 9:16 PM on January 27, 2010
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
Dale Berkebile 8:55 AM on January 30, 2010
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.
Dharmesh Shah 4:57 PM on January 31, 2010
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.
John Lundin 4:58 PM on January 31, 2010
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
Bernie Borges 8:07 PM on January 31, 2010
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.