To make it short: Yes and No!
Yes, because it determines a few aspects of the quality of your links.
No, because it doesn’t tell anything about your ranking for the keywords that will give you the most traffic…
For example, one of my very new sites, www.naturfotokalender.de, has a Pagerank of 0, not surprisingly…
But the ranking at the time of writing this for one of the main keyphrases (“Fotokalender Gimp”) is number one on the german google SERP…
But what is Pagerank, actually? If you have the google toolbar, then you will notice the Pagerank bar and will see that it shows a green bar. More green, higher pagerank, more important site. If it only was this easy…
Ian Rogers has written a comprehensive post on what pagerank really is and how it is calculated and so on:
Ian Rogers article on PageRank
Do I really need to know this?
In my opinion, not really. What you need to know is: If I get links from sites with high pagerank (or pagerank at all, e.g. a minimum of 1) then that is good. Is it good because it help you rank higher? Not exactly – it helps you rank faster, if, and only if, the links have the right anchor text. It helps you rank faster because sites with higher pagerank are spidered more often. That means your link will be found soon by google and can be taken into account. If you have a link on a Pagerank 0 site (grey Pagerank bar) then it takes maybe a month or longer until the site is spidered again (if at all) and it will take ages before this paricular link can contribute to your ranking.
So if you got a blog list from the blog search on seo-traffic-guide.de, look for the dofollow blogs with higher pagerank first…
I know that Pagerank is a controversial topic and I am fully aware that this was only a simplified way of looking at pagerank, so feel free to comment and tell me what you think about PR!
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Good wrap, didn’t realise it can take so long for a PR0 to be spidered by Google.
Thanks for the link to that article by Ian Rogers also, is a good read.
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Hi Terry
The problem with PR0 is: Is it really PR0 or doesn’t it have any Pagerank at all. You can make a short test, go to google and do a site:domaininquestion.com search.
If there are no pages indexed at all, then I’d reckon, It will take even longer…(or google completely ignores that site and doesn’t visit at all, possible too.)
Mike
If you can get a lot of decent links to your site fast it helps a lot when it comes to getting spidered. For new sites article marketing and do follow blog/forum posting are probably the most effective and easiest ways of getting quality back links quickly. Once your site is more established then you can focus on trying to get the high pr links.
I’ve found that PageRank is “important” when you’re selling advertising space or selling your website / blog. It doesn’t (as far as I can tell) affect your SERP ratings at all. I also have a blog that is PR0 that ranks very high for semi-competitive search terms, even ranking higher than websites with PageRank.
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I am of the opinion that page rank is not very useful at all. It is only a guide for getting good backlinks as you say. It seems we are in agreement!
In my opinion PR only matters when the keywords that you are targeting are very competitive. If both you and the competition have good relevant content and trust. Then the one with the highest PR gets the SERP.
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I take PR as just a general indicator of a page’s link worth; basically any page with PR1 or above is worth getting a link from. PR0 sites don’t hurt either.
I’ve had some pr0 sites indexed very fast. All you need to do is to have a regularly updated content and search engines will find you in no time!
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I thought Google reindexed sites based on how quickly a site changes rather than its PageRank? I have some low PR sites that get spidered every day because there is fresh content every day whereas I have other sites with PR4 that only get spidered every few weeks.
Hi “Australian Blog Network”
This is a Keywordluv Blog, please make use of it!
The problem is: How does google know whether a site changes quickly or not? For the beginning Google will take the PR into account.
Of course there are other factors, too. For example if you use a sitemap.xml that tell google that your content changes rather seldom, they will visit rather seldom. If you have a low PR site but an increasing number of incoming links to new pages on your site every day, then google will visit often, because they follow those links. If your site is a blog and pings a lot of blog directories, you might even get several visits per day from the spider as your pingback is found on the directories.
So like with everything in life there are a lot of exemptions to the general rule
Mike
Oh boy, do internet marketers get hung up on PageRank…
For me, the most important aspect of linking is relevancy – make sure it is the same subject.
This will only ever be a bigger factor as time goes on.
PageRank can be a sign though of a site’s ill-health
If a site has a PageRank of 0 then it is worth finding out why. It may be the case that it is new, or it may be because Google has penalized it.
If it is the latter then it is best to avoid it.
Interesting post, I too think nothing of Page Rank at the beginning and rely on other high ranked sites to link to me because of quality content.
Glad to see others think the same.
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I think people spend too much time worrying about page rank. As you said it can have an affect on serps, but its certainly not as important as some people claim. A lot of it is just a webmaster ego thing, or people who want to sell links.
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In my opinion when ranking for keywords the content matters most. But if there are several pages competing for the same keywords with quality content. Then the one with the highest PR ranks highest.
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Hi Joe
What you say sounds logical but has been proven wrong. It is easily possible to rank higher for a given keyword and even inferior content quality if you have a larger number of incoming links with the keyword to rank for as anchor text…
Mike
Gosh am I the only person that frets over page rank? I lose sleep trying to work out shy one of my blogs ranks hugher than my site and the other blog (both blogs hosted on my domain).
It’s ok saying get good links with relevant anchor text but it’s the how that’s the problem. Articles are good for anchor text but even the commentluv you are using on this blog doesn’t give you the opportunity to choose your anchor text.
Maybe it’s just me that’s lost?!
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Woops very sorry, just found the keywordluv thing … very nice, off to add it to my blog!!
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Pagerank is also important on certain sites that list companies. One of the few ways to order them other than by alphabet seems to be ranking them on PR. If your site has high PR, it simply has higher visibility on those pages.
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I think PR is getting less and less important. It would be very interesting to see what would happen to the SEO industry if Google got rid of the PageRank system completely and used a system that wasn’t so transparent. The link rental market would certainly be drastically changed. Maybe sites with older domains would dominate? Maybe Alexa rank would be more important?
I think it really doesn’t matter a whole lot. I know a lot of people get caught up in the fool bar ranking, but its the quality of the link that matters more. I’ve seen plenty of real estate sites that rank for tops terms and only have a pr of 2 or 3. BUT they have a great backlink base. Its far better to find a highly relevant link with a low pr than a high pr link from an unrelated site.
What an interesting thought. If Google got rid of the PR system would link spam decrease?
One of the problems with following Googles PageRank is the fact that it is only updated every few months. Therefore a website might show a PR0, but really be a PR3 that hasn’t been updated yet. Personally, I do pay attention to PageRank, but I think that there are much better tools to discover what is really driving a website. There are some really good free Firefox plug-ins that are available.
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To prove your point you can see countless examples of pages ranking higher that have a lower PR than the pages they are beating. And this is for all kinds of keywords.
I agree with the opinion that page rank is not very useful at all. However, one can use it as a guide for getting good backlinks.
Googlebot crawl rate not only depends of PR. It also can be improved in Google webmaster tools. PR is important as part of ranking algorithm no matter does an anchor text of incoming link have relevant keyword or not.
Yes of course incoming links without the right keyword anchor help to improve your PR, and help to boost your ranking. but I am pretty sure that 10 links with the proper keyword will easily outrank 100 links without that keyword…
Good to know.
It seems as if pages with a page rank of 3 or higher get crawled atleast a few times a week. So really, unless the sites are relevant to what you’re linking to, it seems like a waste of time to try to get inlinks from sites with high PR. Is that a popular consensus, or am I way off base?
I think you’re off track. I don’t believe Google crawls higher PR pages more frequently inless the content is changed regularly (new sites for example). The thing about links from high PR sites is that the links juice flows to the pages eventually increasing the target page’s PR. That’s what PR is all about.
In regards to page rank and how google issues authority or position, you may want to try this:
site:yourdomainname.com
and then try…
site:yourdomainname.com/*
The first results will give you BOTH indexed and supplemental pages and the second result will give you googles ACTUAL indexed pages.
You can verify these results by experimenting with the keywords that are used on those pages. You’ll notice that the results from the second query will rank higher.
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no its not but if you have a high page rank it gives you more of a authority aspect when it comes to other sites its more like bragging rights for the sites owner but that really doesn’t have any effect on your traffic or anything else
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I think what pagerank is good for is boosting your ego! Plus of course if you sell links (which is naughty, google said…)
Pagerank is important if you are selling links but in terms of SERP result or keyword ranking, it doesn’t contribute much.
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Will it help to get PR quicker if you have links from social sites and bookmarking sites with high PR?
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Hello Manie
Yes it will, the exact explanation on how PageRank works can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank.
In short: the more high PR links you ganin the heigher your own PR will rise. But don’t make the mistake to believe that this has to correlate 1:1 with your rankings for specific keywords in the SERPs.
This can only be achieved by having lot’s of links with the right keywords on them and a bit of on page optimization.
Mike
I wonder if you could use a page rank for a paper. As a student you use PR as an indicator that the information is correct an trusted.