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What is your view of website page rank, does it really serve any purpose?

by blackcobra
18 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Some people say that PR is not important anymore (at least not nearly as important as it once was). What is your opinion? Is PR obsolete?
#page #purpose #rank #serve #view #website
  • Profile picture of the author Jayski32
    PR is the ONLY metric we get directly from Google (outside of actual rankings) that gives us any sort of clue of how Google actually views the site. All other metrics like DA/PA, TF/CF come from third parties. So yes, Pagerank is still very important.
    The issue is that its a woefully incomplete metric. Thats where the third part metrics come in. To help fill in the gaps. With that said the best signal of all is the actual backlinks themselves.
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi blackcobra,

      The title of your post asks "What is your view of website page rank, does it really serve any purpose?"

      First, let me say that there is no such thing as "website page rank". Google does not rank websites, they rank individual web pages.

      Pagerank is an an important signal used in Google's algorithm to weight the value of anchortext. Anchortext is one of the 4 primary signal groups and as such is a very important metric. Pagerank is just a weighting factor, not a relevancy factor, so it's impact occurs primarily through how it weighs the anchortext signal group.

      The 4 most important metrics for SEO besides the SERP ranking are he 4 primary signal group search operators:
      1. allintitle
      2. allinurl
      3. allinanchor
      4. allintext
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  • Profile picture of the author backlinkreator
    please Dburk can you throw more light on the four important stuff you said
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Originally Posted by backlinkreator View Post

      please Dburk can you throw more light on the four important stuff you said
      Hi backlinkreator,

      It is the basics of SEO, relevancy signals. Google uses 4 groups of signals, which is common knowledge, and hundreds of weighting factors (their secret sauce) for those 4 groups of signals. The signal groups are not secret and results are easily check for each of the 4 groups via search operators I listed in post above.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tim P
    It makes your website more authority. Everybody say that it doesn't effect rank but who don't want a high pr ?
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  • Profile picture of the author blackcobra
    @Jayski32 - In your opinion, how important is PR compared to other metrics like DA/PA, TF/CF?

    @dburk - The 4 metrics you provided are very interesting. So you are saying that PR is mostly based on the anchortext signal group?

    @Tim P - I'm not 100% sure that PR does not affect rankings. Maybe it still does, who knows for sure?
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Originally Posted by blackcobra View Post

      @dburk - The 4 metrics you provided are very interesting. So you are saying that PR is mostly based on the anchortext signal group?
      Hi blackcobra,

      PageRank is simply a weighting factor that sets the weight of the outbound anchortext relevancy signal. The only measurable impact Pagerank has on rankings is in how much weight the anchortext signal group will have on influencing the overall weight of relevancy signals on pages that the anchortext links to. This is why internal link structure so important for ranking well.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    Internal pagerank is still highly relevant in Google's algorithm today but you can't see it. However, external pagerank is useless/obsolete now.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Eddie
    They don't update it often enough anymore, so it's not really that useful a metric for us to use on its own.There are PR 5's and 6's that people are buying and selling that have hardly any worthwhile links left pointing at them.

    It's common to see people selling links on domains that they claim to be powerful PR 4's and 5's, and then when they list the DA it's something like 15! lol..Unlikely to be a powerful PR5.

    You have to take PR with a pinch of salt these days.
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    • Profile picture of the author veronicajose
      ya it is important.. Pagerank counts the number and quality of links to a page to show rough the importance of a website
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  • Profile picture of the author Icematikx
    Pagerank is useless and is quickly growing to become a redundant metric that nobody relies on or uses. Apart from it not being updated in god knows how long, it's also extremely easy to game.

    If I have a PR6 domain, and link to a new website, that new website will be a PR3/PR4 on the next update. In that sense, the newly created PR3/PR4 would be weak - yet people consider PR3/PR4 domains strong based on pagerank alone.

    Google has mentioned numerous times that they are trying to get away from pagerank as it is easy to game and serves no real purpose. Most google related penalties are due to "gaming the pagerank" system - either through buying a link or building a link yourself. It is fair to say that Google is sick and tired of their own algorithm - it's now presenting more problems than benefits.

    And, with technology evolving, Google no longer has to rely on a 10 year old algorithm. Google can now understand more about web pages that link out, such as the on-page content, the content surrounding the link, the author of the page and much more - and all these are factors which in my opinion, will far surpass the "amount of pagerank" passed metric.
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      Though the pagerank as we see it in the toolbar is heavily outdated it's still the number one most important metric of all as it's what Google uses their selves.

      When you think of it it makes sense, a site with a high pagerank has a lot of links or the links pointing at them have a lot of links pointing at them. It's just a cumulative of links / link juice.

      Who are the best performing sites? Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, they all have a PR in the range of PR9-10.

      Who comes next? Large news sites like CNN, BBC, Forbes, all in the range of PR7-PR8 and so on.

      So the higher the pagerank the more authority a domain has and thus pagerank still drives rankings like nothing else.

      Obvious pagerank can be artificially created like Icematic said, a solid PR6 domain can easily make a PR5 if you keep the outbound links limited. Now obvious you can't expect awesome results from a domain with just 1 single PR6 backlink, a PR5 domain with let's say 100's of referring domains will beat it out the bush any day any time, still it carries a decent amount of value as it's only 1 tier away from a strong PR6 domain.

      Obvious you won't rank on pagerank alone, other things that play a role are anchor text's and relevancy of the link as well as amount of links and amount of unique sources they come from and obvious the content on your site like dburk explained already, keywords in title, keywords in URL, keywords in content (though keywords in URL don't seem to carry much weight anymore and the title also has a lot less value then before).

      Still you obvious need to show Google the relevancy of the page so if I have to chose between mentioning the keyword in the title or in the content I would still go for the title of course. Luckily we don't have to chose but we do have to be careful as:

      exact keyword in title +
      exact keyword couple of times in the content +
      exact keyword in the URL +
      exact keyword in multiple anchor text links

      =

      sensitive for penalties
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  • Profile picture of the author ketul
    According to user, Page Rank have no meaning. It is just number that google give all sites web pages according to their content and related back links. PR factor never affect website ranking. PR is dynamic because it changes with google PR update algorithm.
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    • Profile picture of the author Icematikx
      Originally Posted by ketul View Post

      According to user, Page Rank have no meaning. It is just number that google give all sites web pages according to their content and related back links. PR factor never affect website ranking. PR is dynamic because it changes with google PR update algorithm.
      I'm sorry, but if you don't understand the concept of pagerank, why are promoting your own services?

      "It's just a number". No it isn't. It's one of the key ranking factors that Google use to determine how authorative a page is.

      As I stated in my previous post, I firmly believe that Google will try to get away from pagerank as a public metric. They will either keep it hidden completely, or reduce the weight that pagerank has on rankings.

      "PR factor never affect website ranking."

      Hilarious.
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  • Profile picture of the author promo87
    Banned
    Well, actually I don't concentrate over it much, what I concentrate over is the quality of work which we are currently doing. I would say PR can be increased in a day buy purchasing links from high PR sites but teust me next time Google updates they are going to clear down the whole PR you have gained. It might happen that you will get penalized because of you have purchased ! So better to stay far away from such things an concentrate over the quality of work and next time the PR updates you will have something to smile upon others. Just don't focus too much about it because since last december it hasn't been updated and don't think its going to be updated by the end of this year. It's better to concentrate over the search engine rankings instead of concentrating over the something different.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ferzy
    If PR would be constantly updated, i think it would be a more reliable metric than DA, PA, TF and CF. But since it's not, people prefer to use metrics from third-party companies since they are more up to date, even if they are extremely susceptible to spam links and can be easily inflated.
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  • Profile picture of the author cherbeat
    It can be good for Google's purposes. Remember the new SEO is based around how much social engagement you are getting to your posts. So on one hand YES, PageRank does matter but on the other it really doesn't.

    Just a thought..

    Good Luck
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