Why PageRank Doesn't Matter

Why Google PageRank Doesn't Matter

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What is PageRank (PR)?

Google's pagerank is a measure created by Google of a sites trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.

It is important to realise that PageRank applies to each individual page on a site & is not a sitewide value. One page can be PR 5 and another could have no PR.

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

That is why you'll hear search engine professionals talking about how a single link from an authority (high PR) site can be worth more than lots of links for a low PR site.

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What? Two Versions?

Google has two versions of PageRank, a publically displayed metric and an internal value that they do not release to the public.

The public version is only updated once every 3 months or so (there's even rumours that it only gets updated once a year).

Therefore the public toolbar PR is almost always out of date by up to 3 months.

That's reason #1 why your PR doesn't matter.

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Rankings & PageRank

It is well known in the search marketing industry that good (high) pagerank doesn't equate to good (high) rankings. A PR 0 site can easily outrank a PR4 or PR5 site (and above).

Therefore concentrating on building PageRank in the hope that it will automatically convert into higher rankings for your keyphrases is a waste of time.

That's reason #2 why PR doesn't matter.

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Pagerank alone doesn't pay the bills, it doesn't generate enquiries, sales or conversions. A little green bar will never make your business or website a success, no matter how optimistic you are.

A great site with a PR0 doesn't make it a bad site. It may be a new site, have had recent server problems (downtime) or the toolbar itself may be reporting bad data.

As has been said many times before, concentrate on building quality content that people will want to share with others & build your inbound links to get rankings that bring traffic, the PageRank will follow ... but if it doesn't ... so what?!!?!

PS. You don't just have to take my word for it, most SEO experts agree on this. Here, and here and even here.

Location and Previous Searches: Affect on Google Results

How does Location & Previous Search History Affect Google Results?

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If Google (and other search engines) know where you're located, they can (and will try) to display more relevant results based on that location.

For example if you're searching for pizza shops or plumbers or car dealers & you're located in London, you're going to want ones that are nearby and not a pizza shop in Edinburgh.

If you sign in to your Google account (Youtube is obviously included in this) and you have previously searched for MS and been looking for pages and information about multiple sclerosis then you're likely to want to see the same sort of result should you search for MS again. Rather than seeing results for Microsoft or manuscript or milestone.

Of course, there is the option to opt out of these services and clear your browser history and cookies but most people will find that providing Google with your location is a small price to pay for much more targeted results.

Does Google use META tags to categorise its web pages?

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They no longer use the keywords meta tag to rank sites in the results pages.

They do use the TITLE tag, meta title tag (two seperate entities) & the meta description along with other tags such as the robots meta tag.

While the meta description doesn't have a huge (if any) impact on ranking position, the keywords used to search will be bold in the description. Therefore a well written description tag will increase CTRs to your pages.

It is worth noting that the search engines can choose whether or not to use the description tag but in most cases they will.

Pingomatic Button for Firefox

Pingomatic browser button for Firefox

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Wouldn't it be great if you could ping a page instantly as soon as you land on it. Well now you can.

Pingomatic is a multi-service ping engine that basically informs various bots (including Google) that the page is new or has recently been updated. Therefore the spiders will rush to the page in an attempt to index it as quickly as possibly.

This method doesn't require any browser addons or additional software.

Here's the code if you want to see the workings of it (Text File Download as Blogger doesn't like embedding live code).

Alternatively you can simply drag this to your Firefox Toolbar and everything will be setup and ready to go --> Ping This Page

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