PageRank meter in my Google toolbar - is it just nonsense?

13 replies
  • SEO
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I'm relatively new to SEO and have naively assumed that the little PageRank meter in my Google toolbar in Firefox is a good indicator of whether a site is doing well or not.

I run a site called Masculinity Movies (masculinity dash movies dot com) and I used to get 2/10 on the meter. Then I implemented around 30 of Angela's backlinks (all I've had time for) and saw pretty much the next day a drop to 1/10. I thought that was strange (and makes me hesitate about implementing more)!

I have hardly spent any time marketing the site, but when I use Yahoo Site Explorer, I find that I have just over 200 inbound links.

Now, I'm going to be launching a new product with a business associate soon called the PortaPad. We're rebranding the entire operation, which is currently found on portapad.co.uk. This site has no inbound links at all in the Site Explorer, but still gets a 3/10 on the PageRank. This, to me at least, seems like absolute nonsense and makes me question if I should stop checking the PageRank completely.

Can anyone tell me what, if anything, this PageRank number actually indicates and possibly also why I could've dropped a point after doing my first ever SEO work. And what should be my next step?

Thank you for this great resource. Invaluable for a newbie like myself.

Best regards,
Eivind F. Skjellum
Founder of Masculinity Movies and budding Internet entrepeneur
#google #meter #nonsense #pagerank #toolbar
  • Profile picture of the author knightofdawn
    Pagerank is completely nonsense. Do you actually have conversion w/ your PR3 site to dime?
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  • Profile picture of the author chini
    PR is nothing, only when it comes down to buying links or exchanging.
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  • Profile picture of the author cg101
    If you've got no IBL's then you'll probably see it drop back to 0 at the next pr update but that's just my 2 cents. However PR is not that important.. it says more about credibility and trustworthiness than anything from what I can tell.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ardit
    Pagerank is simply how Google ranks a page in importance using incoming links.

    Some people hate it (as seen above) others love it, either way it's nothing to stress over. PR will come with a legitimately built site over time.

    As for the PR in the toolbar being different, well the toolbar only updates pagerank every couple months even though it's really updating constantly.
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  • Profile picture of the author EivindFS
    Okay, so what I take away from these replies is that I shouldn't sweat so much over a fluctuating PageRank. That's nice to know.

    If you are asking if the PR3 site brings in some good sales, knightofdawn, then the answer is no. My business partner has been running it half-heartedly, and nothing much has come of it. That's why I can't understand how it got a PR3 in the first place.

    cg101: Would IBL be an inbound link? So you're suggesting that the PR3 site will lose all of its PageRank next time around if it doesn't have any inbound links? That would make sense to me - although I think the site has been unlinked to since the beginning.

    Thanks all of you,
    Eivind
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    • Profile picture of the author Ardit
      Originally Posted by EivindFS View Post

      Okay, so what I take away from these replies is that I shouldn't sweat so much over a fluctuating PageRank. That's nice to know.

      If you are asking if the PR3 site brings in some good sales, knightofdawn, then the answer is no. My business partner has been running it half-heartedly, and nothing much has come of it. That's why I can't understand how it got a PR3 in the first place.

      cg101: Would IBL be an inbound link? So you're suggesting that the PR3 site will lose all of its PageRank next time around if it doesn't have any inbound links? That would make sense to me - although I think the site has been unlinked to since the beginning.

      Thanks all of you,
      Eivind
      In short, yes you shouldn't stress over page PageRank.

      As for the inbound link situation, Google is weird sometimes. My brother-in-law, for example, had a one month old site with absolutely no content on it and one link to its name yet it some how acquired a PageRank 3.

      It's now gone, which shows that these things are not always concrete and can be taken away as quickly as they are falsely given.
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  • Profile picture of the author MoneyTopList
    Toolbar pagerank is only indicator how good is the website doing. But it is not the most important factor. I have a firefox extension which displays google pagerank and alexa rank. With both of these ranks you can easily make better picture about the website. E. g. many sites which try to sell links have good PR but no visitors. With both of these toolbars you can see that.
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  • Profile picture of the author JeffLam
    Like what most people have said, PR nothing to ranking and/or traffic.

    It has more to do with how established your site is and to a certain extent how many links you have to your site.

    Nothing more, nothing less!
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  • Profile picture of the author warrich
    pagerank is just a ranking out of 10 , how much google loves your pages and gives ranking, ranking is depend upon many things
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  • Profile picture of the author cagliostro
    If PR is nothing for search and traffic, then why some warriors here suggest that when you pick a new niche, check that the first 10 in google searches (competition) are of low PR ?

    Am i missing something ?
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    • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
      Please guys don't lead people the wrong way. Pagerank IS important. Google didn't just put it out there for fun. It CAN affect Serps. and therefor traffic. As for the ops situation -

      As far as I know Google does NOT update PR that quickly. What you saw may be a function of the tools or just a natural fluctuation. I doubt in a day Google had even found all the backlinks so I would venture to say that the links had almost nothing to do with it.
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  • Profile picture of the author ayyaz1234
    Im really confused about this whole pagerank thing, my site was a pagerank 3 yesterday and now a 0. Can anyone explain to me why this is. The internal pages still rank 2.
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  • Profile picture of the author EivindFS
    Thanks for presenting a different take, Mike. I'm of course a little confused by all of this and figure I will have to find out the hard way.

    But it would be correct to assume that the more backlinks I get, the more my PageRank should increase, yes? And with an increase in PR, my site would bubble up the search results, surely?

    Seems like I'm not the only one confused here, ayyaz1234 :-) Hope you get your points back!

    Eivind
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