Personally, I think Google PR is over-rated. I’ve seen some horrific sites with decent PR. (Example to follow…). Some SEO/webmaster people fixate on Google PR like it’s the only thing that matters. In fact, it’s but one of more than 100 different factors Google uses to score web pages. (more of Matt’s wisdom, not mine)
Despite Matt’s advice to not obsess over PR, people do. Like this commenter on Matt’s blog:
I’d love to see PageRank to be more accurate on highly dynamic websites. ATM it seems PR inheritance is based mostly on URL-depth (delimited by / ) instead of true link-depth. Our mainsite has PR4 while links to dynamic pages from that page usually have PR0 at best. The target-page content is always static we’re just using mod_rewrite to hide highly parameterized URLs.
Whew. I read that six times and it’s still gobbledy-gook to me.
Rather then try to decipher all that PR inheritance, highly parameterized URL stuff just to make a little green bar get bigger, I think I’ll stick to my own extremely technical Search Engine Optimization strategy:
Write content that people need, in a way they can understand it.
I know that’s incredibly deep and profound. But seriously, if you’ve got a web site what’s more important — having something your visitors need, or busting your butt hoping a green bar that most people don’t even know is there slides up a notch every now and then?
If Google PR is so all fired important, someone PLEASE explain this to me. Our main web site has been on-line over two years and has about 300 pages of content. The website gets daily updates. There are a lot of good “backlinks” to it. It ranks very well for many key terms in Google. It has a Google PR of 4, which isn’t too shabby. I can live with it. This very blog has a PR of 5 (up from 4 in this most recent update). I can live with that too.
Here’s where I struggle, and why it seems to me that often Google PR is a worthless measure of a web site. What if I told you I know of a real estate blog that has a grand total of 5 (yes, FIVE) posts. It only has one backlink from a PR 0 site. Here are the dates of the five posts that comprise this entire blog:
- June 5, 2003
- June 6, 2003
- November 23, 2003
- April 2, 2004
- April 12, 2006
That’s it. 5 posts in almost three and a half years. 653 total words in the blog, the last one of which entered six months ago. For comparison, there are 653 words in this POST (by design naturally 🙂 ) It is, by anyone’s definition, a pitiful blog. (hat tip to RSSPieces for locating this gem. How they found it is beyond me.)
So what is the Google Page Rank of this masterpiece of a blog? It’s a PR 4 site. Same as my web site, same as this blog was just a week ago.
Sorry folks, you can argue PR importance until you are blue in the face. PR appears to me to be useless. I’d *love* to hear a reasonable explanation of why this real estate blog with it’s 653 words of content in 3.5 years is a PR 4 site.
[tags]Google PR, SEO, Real Estate Blog[/tags]
The Phoenix Real Estate Guy was started by Jay Thompson, and I have a little blogging problem... he liked to say...
Excellent piece on page rank and thanks for the shout out to RSSPieces. One of the other great resources for Page Rank and general SEO advice is the uber guru, Aaron Wall of http://www.seobook.com. He really breaks down what Page Rank really means and how unimportant it is in the scheme of things. If you have quality content, growing backlinks and a solid linkbait strategy, eventually you will grow your page rank. It's the chicken and the egg scenario- you have to have the traffic, the links and do the time before PR will grow- but once it does- it will exponentially help you increase in the Search engine results pages.
Thanks for the link to Aaron's blog REBlogGirl, it's a wealth of great info!!
It looks like that RE blog you are talking about has around 100 incoming links that are published by the SE's, and a few of them are PR 5 and higher… that would probably explain the PR 4.
But you are definately right, it's a shame that a site like that would have any PR at all.
It's good that Google doesn't rank sites based soley on PR because if they did, we'd all be in big trouble. It's just one of many ranking factors. I think when you get into the higher PR's like 6-9… it is a much better indication of a quality (or at least popular) site.
re :http://www.naplesflorida.blogspot.com/
Doing backlinks in Google is a waste of time.
He has 60 backlinks to his index page .
Check Yahoo or MSN as they will show many of the links.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link:http://www…. -site:blogspot.com
You could also check the internal pages backlinks.
PR does matter along with a ton of other stuff. It does not matter like 3 years ago however, where all you needed was a title tag and high PR.
Tim O'Keefe
Marketing Online for real estate
Jay:
I could be wrong, but I think page rank is factoring in all content on ???.blogspot.com and pushing this particular subdomain up. Since this blog is a subdomain of a larger domain (blogspot.com, about 2 million blogs), I suspect it gets some undeserved attention. It's also important to point out that Google owns Blogspot. 😉
In any case, I agree – PR is a bit overstated; you're better off going insane watching the DOW.
bf
I'm fairly new to the world of SEO, but I think that PR has pretty much no significance. In my book, I'm more concerned w/ actual ranking for keywords – where you land on the SERPs. As far as PR, I think it's good for bragging rights, and bragging rights only.
Hi Jay, thanks for the nice article. I learned from it. I think I got some out of date advice from another agent, so I was doing a little homework. You cleared it up for me.
Thanks!
Ken Jansen REALTOR Overland Park KS
Hi Jay,
Great article!
PR is a tempting thing to be infatuated with (I kinda am) but I find that when I am testing my SEO efforts , you are right it doesn't really have that huge an effect on what shows up on Google.
There are realtors in my market who have publicized their PR and they're sites don't show up often…
Thanks!
Wow! I guess I have a lot to learn. I always thought that PR is the holy grail for backlinks. The higher, the better. I just completed my website and I am actually paying an SEO guy to promote it, but the results are not what I thought they would be. If you have a moment check it out and let me know what you think.
Jose Lopez
Sarasota Foreclosures
PR is worthless, I have a PR of Zero and out-rank sites in my market with a PR or 4. Totally useless metric.
Sarasota Real Estate