PageRank used to be the Holy grail to some website owners – seeing a magical 6 or more in the PageRank toolbar meant you had achieved Nirvana (or so some people thought).
But then things moved on – PR isn’t as important now.
Yet still I receive emails asking me to ‘improve my PageRank’ or ‘buy a link from us as we have PR6′ and more.
So it came as a breath of fresh air when I read Adam Lasnik’s comments in 10 SEO Myths Debunked, over on Imedia Connection.
PageRank was a rather defining aspect of early Google search. Today, however — while PageRank still plays a role — we use more than 200 signals in ranking search results. This means that webmasters who focus primarily on PageRank are missing the bigger picture and overlooking aspects of their website that they have more control over. Of particular note, PageRank is focused on the issue of a page’s importance, whereas a larger component in determining search results is relevance. We aim to deliver results that are relevant to the query typed into the search box, the area where the person is searching from and, in many cases, even each person’s own demonstrated interests, based upon search history.
You can read the whole article here - it makes for some great reading and is well worth grabbing a coffee and making some time for it.
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Tags: adam lasnik, Google, google myths, imedia
As someone who specializes in SEO/SEM I have to agree on the one hand, that everything else about the page is as important, if not more so, than PageRank.
However, on the other hand, there are two cases where PageRank becomes a defining success factor.
The first is when the inbound authority is so powerful that it compensates for the brevity of keywords in the content. This is rare, but can happen.
The second is when all other pages are equal in terms of relevance, at which point, having a higher PageRank becomes the only way that Google can distinguish between two otherwise equal pieces of content.
Still, it’s nice to know that PageRank can be worried about ‘later’.
Best,
Guy ‘LeckyT’
http://twitter.com/leckyt
http://keywordcracker.blogspot.com