Does Google Page Rank Matter?
What is Google Page Rank? And does it matter?
To put it into the simplest terms – Google gives your website a score from 0 to 10. This score is your page rank. It does not judge the quality of the website, the quality of the content or how many visitors go to that website.
The score is based on in-coming links to your website. One of the backbones of SEO is the golden rule ‘The more in-coming links you have to your website, the better the search engine ranking’.
So the more in-coming links you have, the better your Google Page Rank, but things get a little more interesting when looking at the Google Page Ranks of websites linking to you. Think of it as a scoring system, you may have 10 websites linking to you all with page ranks of 1/10.
This is fine, but did you know that sites with higher Google page ranks are worth more? You could match those 10 in-links of 1/10 by having 5 in-links of 2/10 – see how it works?
Now this is all well and good but how does it affect SEO? It’s good to have big sites with high page ranks linking to you! This is important in link building as you could spend a week building up 0/10 and 1/10 links when a little thought and consideration could get you a 7/10 link that could be worth more.
Does Google Page Rank Matter?
Of course there is the usual debate about Google Page Rank – I think the consensus now is that your own page rank doesn’t really matter too much. There are much more important areas of SEO that you need to focus on than raising that Google Page Rank that only you and other SEO’s see and know about!
Google Page Ranks are updated roughly every 3 months, this is another reason not to focus too much on it as you’ll be waiting a long time to see some results! If your interested here is my Google Page Rank:
Another thing I find Google Page Rank useful for is explaining SEO to non technically minded people. Recently I had to give a presentation to sales staff and I used this image to explain what Google Page Rank is:
Google Page Rank Pyramid
This is an image (and a concept) that people seem to understand. Some websites do well and are given a better score, some don’t do so well and are at the bottom of the pyramid. Much easier to digest than keyword density, meta tags and the behaviour of robots. Also a good example that SEO can be explained simply without the techno-jargon.
So while Google Page Rank is a useful tool to see the value of in-coming links and to demonstrate SEO to others, you shouldn’t worry too much about your own Google Page Rank.
