Is the PageRank Drop From Google Webmaster Tools a Ploy To Get SEOs Not Focus on PR to Build Links or Do They Think It’s Really Irrelevant?
October 19, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik
We all know PageRank has changed the way we look at sites for SEO purposes. That little green scale on the toolbar is one of the first things we look at, maybe not anymore, but there is somewhat of an obsession if not from the SEO, from the person that owns the website. WHY? Has it ever been an indicator of how a website ranks? No, not really.
As Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa states, “”We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” says Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”
As described by Wikipedia, “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).”
There is a great video on WebProNews with EricWard from EricWard.com regarding if PageRank never existed.
“As Eric notes, Google has never actually said don’t buy links. They just say don’t buy our PageRank. Don’t buy the PageRank measure that they’ve assigned to a site. Buying a link would make sense just like buying a banner would’ve made sense ten years ago. If your motivation is click traffic that’s fine, says Ward. If your motivation is that you want to buy a link from a high PageRank site so that you can rank high, then you’re in the area that Google doesn’t like.”
So, with that said, will you change your link building strategies? If pagerank is really irrelevant, do you still think its best to get a link from a site with a PR 2 or a site with a PR 5?
Other Articles Regarding PageRank For Your Interest:
Say Pagerank Update and Everybody Jumps
PageRank Update: To Follow or Not To Follow?
Paid Links Don’t Hurt Your PageRank Right? Matt Cutts?
Comments (3)
! I hadn’t considered the evidently simple ways the big G worked in. The matter is that even though a spider looks at your page abundant times, it takes a ton of effort on your part to get a website to become interesting to Google. I guess this will add to my understanding of SEO!
Impressive commentary about SEO. I’m frankly stunned that that has not been enunciated earlier.
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