The hot thing for the last year or so is to proclaim “PageRank is useless! Ignore it!“. Some of the dumbest things I hear are statements like “A PR2 site can outrank a PR7 site, therefore PageRank is meaningless.” Duh! If a higher PR site always ranked better, then Google.com (PR10) would rank first for every query. There are certainly other factors in play, and PageRank is just a piece of it.
I’ll certainly admit that PageRank isn’t as valuable as it once was. However, it is still presumed to be a small piece of the Google algorithm (along with 100+ other factors), making it not completely worthless. It might not help much, but if it helps at all then it can’t be considered “worthless”.
More importantly, it’s crucial to understand what PageRank represents. It’s the little things that contribute to your PageRank that are worthwhile, and the green bar is a representation of that.
Let’s use a football analogy. Suppose your team is 10-0, and you’re about to play the team that’s 0-10. Chances are good that you’ll win. However, you aren’t going to win based on the fact that you’re 10-0. In fact, your previous record is of no value in this game. What is of value are the things that contributed to that 10-0 record. For example, your team would likely have:
- a big offensive line
- a smart quarterback
- a talented defense
- a clutch kicker
The green PageRank bar is like your 10-0 record. It won’t help much on it’s own, but it represents other things about your site. If a site has a PR7 and is ranking well, it’s not ranking there because of the PageRank itself, but because of what that PageRank represents — lots of inbound links, many coming from other quality sites.
This site is a great example of that. I’ve watched traffic slowly grow since I started writing, and our PageRank has gone up as well. The PageRank is an indication of the growing number of inbound links that we’ve earned, and those links are helping us rank better, thus increasing our traffic.
Is this a fair assessment of the current state of PageRank? Do you think it still means more? Or do you maybe think it’s been pulled from the algorithm and is indeed worthless?
PageRank is not dead. It is a key component of Google’s algorithm. What is dead is toolbar pagerank. What shows on the toolbar and what a pages pagerank reall is are two completely different things.
The toolbar PR is for fun. Google would never let the real golden goose out of the box but they throw some very skewed numbers out there to mess with uninformed link buyers who think TBPR still matters.
John,
Well-said. I thought about covering “real PR vs. TBPR”, but decided not to get into it. You said it pretty well, though. 🙂