Is Pagerank becoming irrelevant?

[DrMarie]

In October, 2009, Google took the Pagerank feature off of the Webmaster Tools profile. I read something about Google saying that Pagerank was for "entertainment purposes only".

So is Pagerank really important? Does it really affect your position in the SERPS?

My vet advice site is rating really high on the first page of most search terms and it has a Pagerank of 0.

Just wondering what you guys thought!

 

[djbaxter]

It is still a factor but its importance in Google ranking has been declining for a good few years now. At one time, PageRank was the primary ranking factor. A few years later, Google employees talled about PR being just one of about 100 factors... and then one of more than 100 factors... and most recently only one of mo9re than 200 factors.

Additionally, the values displayed in the Google toolbar or in other public places is not real PageRank but merely an approximate graphical representation of actual PR. Moreover, since Google only exports updates to public PR 3-5 times a year on average and since it needs to sample and convert the actual PR data prior to beginning the public updates, even when an update occurs it is typically a week or two out of date. Then, as time passes, the public PR becomes increasingly more out of date. That's a big part of why Google removed it from Webmaster Tools: the values you can actually see for PR are often quite inaccurate, especially for newer sites.

Your experience of seeing low PR sites outranking higher PR sites for specific search terms has always been true. It is now more true than ever.

Is PR irrelevant? Perhaps if we had any way of ascertaining real PR it would still have some small value. As it is, it is pretty much worthless and reveals pretty much nothing useful about how your website is performing.

The bottom line is how well you rank and for which terms. That creates the potential for traffic. After that, it's up to your on-page optimization to achieve decent click-through rates and actual page content to determine conversion rates.

 

[djbaxter]

Well I think PR are still relevant cause it determines how important your site on search engine.

See above. PR (1) has limited importance in Google ranking today and (2) does not even apply to ranking in other search engines.

 

[Mousee]

The blog post - PageRank Sculpting (PageRank sculpting) - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

So, I think that this means that Google team is still working and improving PR algorithm.

 

[Oregon Coast Guy]

The page rank for my Oregon coast site went from 3 to 0 a year ago. Pages continue to rank high, my traffic continues to increase, as does the income from the site.

Page Rank hasn't affected me whatsoever.

 

[djbaxter]

The page rank for my Oregon coast site went from 3 to 0 a year ago. Pages continue to rank high, my traffic continues to increase, as does the income from the site.

Page Rank hasn't affected me whatsoever.

Exactly. And that's not an uncommon story these days at all.

 

[Pamela]

I have several blogs and sites with different PR's. But I did not see any change of traffic due to PR change.
So I strongly believe PR is very important in terms of SERP.

But still there are people who buy high PR links for higher price. So if you up to link sales, PR is important.

 

[djbaxter]

I have several blogs and sites with different PR's. But I did not see any change of traffic due to PR change.
So I strongly believe PR is very important in terms of SERP.

Isn't that contradictory? If you don't see traffic varying with different PageRank values, doesn't that confirm what i said earlier - that PR is less and less important as time goes on?

 

[Trafficman01]

Page rank is important in the eyes of the search engines but I would rather have a page rank 0 website on page 1 than a page rank 4 site in the number 50 position.

 

[Charles52]

It still think PR holds an importance. If you look at some of the larger sites, they are always at least a PR4. I definitely still works good.

 

[djbaxter]

I don't think that's necessarily true, but in any case the number of examples of low PR pages outranking high PR pages seems to be increasing daily. And that tells me that PR as a factor continues to decline in importance.

Of course, this is all going by public PR (e.g., Toolbar PR), which we know to be inaccurate. I suppose it's possible that the reason it seems that way in Google search results could be because Toolbar PR is even more inaccurate than we thought. Perhaps Google is intentionally distorting PR for their own reasons?

 

[jean26]

I think pagerank nowadays is less of importance than ever before. Most of my submissions always gets on the first page first position down to 5th.

I think where PR is important still though is to would be advertisers, many of the clients I approach ask me this, to be honest I am not sure they know what PR is exactly just that it holds imprtance, well held importance

 

[TerryTurner]

Pagerank is a significant COMPONENT in the Google search ranking algorithm -- keyword here is "component." Meaning it is merely one of the components that Google considers.

 

[JoshOm]

I think that it is important because when you have a blog with high PR then Google favors it in search results. Of course, I am not implying that when you have high PR then you can do whatever you like. What I am saying is that when every thing is same then a high PR blog will do better than a low PR blog.

 

[Joseph Ratliff]

I'm going to throw people for a "loop" here... (feel kind of facetious this morning)

My opinion on PR is that it is a good (historic) "marketing device" for Google, something to get people to pay attention to them...and it worked didn't it?

Really, has PageRank really been the reason a business will succeed/fail online?

Even though Google gives weight to it, is it 100% (or even a large percentage) of the weight?

To me, good marketing device for Big G.

 

[johnben1444]

Am not a SEO expert but i still think page rank is still important. It tells alot about your site. The search engine can not completely do away with PR. Actually i have seen PR1 site that rank on google first page far above other site with PR4. It may become less important but i wouldn't be ruled out completely.

 

[SimonCambel]

What my concern is, when you get more PR, more guys will like to visit your site as far as google trust your site more. However, there are sites(with less pr) outranks high pr sites in SERP. I agree. However, the sites which outrank in SERP, might get some high PR on next PR update due to hard work on OFFSITE SEO & ONSITE SEO.

Traffic does not depend fully on your PR, but is minor factor.

 

[melovemoney]

I think PR still has some good value, although like minstrel mentioned not nearly as important before as there are so many other factors that come into play now. I think people definitely overplay it, as they focus mainly on that - but it's absolutely NOT totally worthless, at all.