Is PageRank really that unimportant?
June 4, 2008
Today I visited a subdomain of our site after a long time and found that the PageRank of this url is 5. I said Vow! Thats Gr8.
The question is : Wouldn’t you be happy if your PageRank goes from 1 to 5? Would you be wrong to think that you may have better chances of better rankings? Its true that you may or may not have better rankings since there are other factors also which Google consider while determining the ranking. But at least PageRank, which is ONE among all the factors, is in your favour.
Imagine that you are working towards better G! rankings of a website. And you have been doing link building, for say three months. No other task…you are not doing any changes to the site……and you are just dynamically adding content to your site regularly(that is, actually updating your database daily). No other changes on the site. Just link building. No change in rankings. After two months you notice an increase of upto 4 points in the PR . Would you be happy? I felt happy. I put it this way – “Google considers the sites linking to my site as important. Google acknowledges and rewards my link building campaign”.
ABOUT PAGERANK:
According to Google, high PR means a page with higher importance.Importance is judged by the number of votes (links) given by other people(sites) to you and the importance of those sites in question.
When a site links to you, Google considers it as a vote for you. The more number of votes (links)you get from different people (sites), more Google considers you as important. While assigning you a PageRank, it questions the importance of (PR) of the sites linking to you as well. So it can be thought as this way – Pages having high PR are linked to by few pages with high PR or by quite a number of pages with low/moderate PR.
A few facts about PageRank:
PageRank is a Google Trademark.
The actual PageRank considered for computing the rankings in SERPs is different from the Toolbar PageRank. The actual one is the Internal PageRank which is very complex. The ToolBar PageRank can be thought of as a simpler representation of the actual PageRank (Internal PageRank).
PageRank is just ONE of ALL the factors Google considers for determining the rankings for a particular keyword. Some examples of other factors considered for rankings in SERPs are :
Frequency of the occurence of the query keywords in the anchor text of incoming links.
Complete page devoted to the topic related to the query words.
There are several such factors.
The concept of PR was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
References:
http://www.google.com/technology/
http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0512_01.html
