Is Page Rank Important?

Nov 22, 2008

This is one of the questions I get asked a lot so I feel it warrants a blog entry to explain.

Q: Is Page Rank (PR) important?
A: Not as important as you may think!

Page Rank (PR) has been totally misunderstood by most web users. The primary misunderstanding is the phrase itself: it’s a misnomer. Page Rank is actually named after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders and the champion of link popularity. Page rank was originally used to count the amount of inbound links to a website and use that as an approximation of a pages popularity or credibility. This figure would be used to skew the search results in favour of pages with more inbound links.

This is why PR was important. It was essential to have a high PR in order to rank well on the search engines. This worked very well and was tweaked and modified for use in the Google ranking algorithm. Then, Google made a big mistake by allowing the great unwashed to see the PR as a graphical banner in the toolbar.

This caused a huge stir in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and webmaster world. SEOs and webmasters alike thought they had found the holy grail and could use this to raise their website’s ranking position by increasing PR.

It was true, for a while. SEOs started soliciting inbound links by way of directory submission and reciprocal linking with other websites. This was successful for a while, but Google had created a monster that it could not control. A spam monster. Inbound link building had been so over used it was now considered spam and was skewing the results unfairly.

Google needed to redress the balance and modified the algorithm to counteract the moves taken by SEOs who were now considered spammers. Google state in their terms of service that attempting to manipulate the search results is outside of their quality guidelines.

From Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighbourhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Google modified the algorithm in 2006 so that reciprocal links became counter productive. Each link cancelled the other out and became a small minus point in the algo. SEOs tried to outwit this by setting up triangular or daisy wheel links whereas site A links to site B and site B links to site C and so on in an attempt to make all links one way.

Google isn’t silly though and soon works out when this is happening and applies penalties accordingly.

In latter years (2007/8) the Google algorithm has been further refined and modified to take into account link purchasing and this technique has now gone the way of reciprocal lining.

The roll out of Google Caffeine, will further refine the algorithm in respect of link quality.

In summation:
Page Rank is not as important as it once was. It can be used as an indicator of your site’s credibility as perceived by Google, but is only one in over 200 factors taken into account in the Google algorithm.
See my post on Local Rank for more information on Google ranking and why PR is not as important as you think.

Similar Posts:

• How important is site speed?
• How to find good backlinks
• All change for Search Engine Optimisers in the New Year
• Facebook launches search engine in a head-to-head battle with Google.
• Google Caffeine update underway.

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