How important is a site's PageRank?
I was just checking our website's PageRank, mostly out of curiosity, and it got me started wondering, how much does PageRank matter? Does it make a significant difference to advertising revenue (which is not something that we really care about on our site)? Is it primarily for advertising purposes, or does it impact search results?
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It factors in to getting high search results, but it is only part of the recipe for Google special sauce. Of course, Google keeps that recipe secret, so much of what we think matters and how much is only a guess. I read once that Google made nearly 500 changes to its search algorithms in one year, so the target is always moving.
As Google puts it, PageRank is how "important" they think a website is. I read Larry Page referred to it as counting votes. Much of the formula is based on links to your content ("votes"), which it why you see spammers trying to get link-backs on highly ranked sites. The irony is that if they were successful in getting their links left up, it would probably lower the value of those links due to excessive numbers of them.
I think it is fair to say that a high PageRank doesn't ensure that you will have top search results, there is definitely a relationship. Whether that is because sites with high PageRank tend to have better SEO and higher quality content or because of PageRank's impact on search results is speculative. Look at IT World - it has a high PageRank, but it also constantly has fresh, high quality content. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
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Google says it does'nt matter much but honestly I think it does. Inftact all the sites with good PageRank have good SERP positions. Check the comment section of this article Matt Cutts himself said:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/
"the drop in Toolbar PageRank is an indicator of the decrease in our trust of the site."
Btw, ITWORLD has 7 PageRank. :P
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It is important, here's a good background article about it:
PageRank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
"PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google web 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 [related to webpages]. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by
The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.[2][3]
The value of incoming links is colloquially referred to as "Google juice"."