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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Page rank is something that drives my friends crazy when it comes to their blogs. They tend to be very obsessed with it. I recently started using blogs to propell my business forward. But then my friends tried explaining page rank to me and what it means and this led me to get very obssessed with it as well. Little knowledge is dangerous and this proved to be the case in my regard. We all went crazy and were afraid of the page rank, when actually we really did not really know what all the fuss was about. Thank you for clearing out this doubt.
I consider page rank to be important. But at the end of the day it depends on each persons percpective. Tend to not agree with your point of view, I think page rank is very-very important it helps people to see where you stand on the google ladder, this is my view in the matter.
Hi Renny
Well, of course it is not abad sign when your PageRank improves – I am just saying that it has not much to do with your ability to rank for important keywords. Also the value that the google toolbar return can be with a certain element of randomness – even Matt Cutts has confirmed that google will deliver random PR values if they feel like it. Also the Value that is shown is not the same value that google uses internally as it gets updated only once a quarter or something like that. In the meantime your rankings can be completely different.
Also I don’t consider it a good metric if you want to decide whether you’d want a link from a page or not – there are by far better metrics like the Cemper Link Juice or MajesticAC Rank orthe metrics SEOMoz offers…
Mike
Page ranking also helps in SERP. The from site that good PR also have good weight with respect to SEO.
Nice article! It is kind of funny, because many years I believed that page rank is some kind of rank of your website pages. Yes, now I know that Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page. Thank you to have you, Larry. Good job!