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Oct 11
2010
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5 SEO Myths Part 5 - It's All About PageRank
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Today's Myth: If I get a higher PageRank score, I'll definitely rank higher than my competitors.
This is the last post of a 5-part series on search engine optimization myths.
- Part 1: The myth of the magic formula
- Part 2: The myth of the quick fix
- Part 3: The myth of paying your way to the top
- Part 4: All visitors are good visitors
The Myth: It's All About PageRank
If I get a higher PageRank score, I'll definitely rank higher than my competitors.
The Reality
P
ageRank is just one of a multitude of factors used to evaluate your website. Relying on this metric to the exclusion of others is not helpful for your SEO strategy.
Everyone knows that getting incoming links to your website is important if you want to improve your ranking in Google. Long ago, Google created the concept of "PageRank" - which is a 1-10 scale of the popularity of a website based on the number of incoming links. Many assume that a low PageRank guarantees bad ranking and a high PageRank guarantees great rankings - but in fact this is a big myth.
Google PageRank has become strongly associated with the Green bar indicating a site's score on this metric. Many clients worry endlessly about their PR score, and they become extremely worried if the site drops a score. However, the obsessive focus with PageRank has at least 3 problems.
1.) PageRank is Only Part of the Picture
Although PageRank was a tremendous innovation in search when it was first implemented, Google and other search engines have hardly stopped innovating. There are over 200 factors used by Google to determine a web pages' ranking, so focusing on only one metric is unlikely to give a good picture of your search engine success. A great article at SEOMoz shows that there are many other metrics that are more accurate predictors of success than PageRank.
At the very least, solely focusing on this metric is unlikely to give you a broad picture of your SEO campaign.
2.) PageRank is a "Coarse" Metric
You can only score between 1 and 10 with PageRank, and it is a logarithmic scale. That means a site with PageRank of 7 is "10 times" more popular than a site with Pagerank of 6 (similar to the Richter scale, for example). Needless to say, there is quite a bit of room between a site that is barely a 6 and a site that is almost a 7. Thus, PageRank is essentially rounded off very heavily, making it difficult to use this metric to evaluate the impact of your campaign.
For example, if you have a site with a PageRank of 3 and conduct a search engine optimization campaign that dramatically improves the number of links and the popularity of your website, but doesn't quite do enough to earn a PR 4, then you are left with no tangible evidence that your campaign is working (if you focus on PR as your primary metric).
3.) Determining Actual PageRank is Difficult or Impossible
It's difficult to know if the data released by Google is 100% accurate all the time, and in any case Google only updates the PageRank displayed in their toolbar every 3 months or so.
Conclusion
The importance of PageRank has been so overblown that Google has directly addressed the issue. Recently they eliminated PageRank data from Google Webmaster Tools. Explaining the decision, Google employee Susan Moskwa said,
"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."
Although there is nothing wrong with checking your PageRank occasionally or trying to track it over time, please don't obsess over this metric.
