Why webmasters still care about PageRank?
August 24, 2010
I saw this question being asked recently on many forums and answers are very mixed. I will try to find the answer to this question and decide if we still need to spend our efforts to increase PR.
What is Google PageRank (PR) - PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated. PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
Why webmasters care about Google PageRank?
1) Because it shows how important your website is
2) Because it shows how popular your website is (some translating this to website traffic)
3) It brings more traffic
4) Because you can sell links. Bigger PR, higher price for link placement is
5) Webmasters ego
Does all the above is correct? Does PR brings more visitors? Will you earn more money with AdSense with higher PR website?
No, no, and no!
The interest in PageRank is still high and pretty constant.
First of all PageRank is rank of page, not a website rank!
Page rank not brings you more visitors. Webmasters see known websites with high PR and assume if they will increase their own PR, their websites will be known as well. This is wrong perception, and totally opposite from the reality.
The reality is: because website has many visitors, it becomes popular. Once website popular, other websites starting linking to that website, in a natural way. As result, this website receives high PR.
So, will PR bring you more visitors - NO. Will visitors increase your PR - potentially YES (in a long term).
Links from pages with high PR are more expensive. Yes it is true, but pays for them just throws their money and waste their time.
In most of the cases site owners selling links selling them to many websites, and in this case the chances you will increase your PR are close to 0.
Why to pay for PR? It not brings visitors, it no brings more money. The only reason I could imagine is link resale.
Link building strategies killed PageRank. It is now reality that you can increase your PR on website with 0 traffic and almost no content, and Google is aware. That is why PR today is not that important as it was a decade ago.
We all know that PR is not accurate, can be easily tricked and 3-4 months old. Webmasters just obsessed with PR, every second post on webmasters forum is about when next Google PageRank update will be. Sometimes it is even very funny to see websites that can predict future PageRank.
That is why Google should remove PageRank (PR) from their toolbar. Google Webmaster Tools already removed PageRank from their reports!
Now lets imagine day after this small green bar no more available on Google's toolbar
No more link exchange campaigns and no selling links for only one reason of increasing PR.
All junk web directories will simply disappear, leaving only good quality web directories (as it used to be many years ago).
Webmaster will care about their content, instead of being obsessed with their PR.
Finally Google can give back more importance to PR.
I suggest webmasters, whose main strategy is to increase their PR, to change their efforts and concentrate on website's content. Content will bring you visitors, high ranking and more revenue - this is best long-term website promotion strategy.
What Google should do? In my opinion, whatever is considered to be part of their search algorithm should not be available to public. That will keep these algorithm ingredients truthful and trustful.
But, it looks like as our nature or our mentality we all like to be ranked. Probably it comes from school days, when we evaluated and given grades.
I suggest Google to introduce another website wise grade.
That grade should include as a package: website popularity (known as PR today), website quality and websites traffic level.
And if webmasters will try to trick that new grade, Google will be just happy about, because this is what Google wants!
And of course we all will benefit from this.