Why Page Rank Is Important In Building Traffic

[Dale King]

Google Page rank (correctly PageRank) is important in building traffic to your website for a number of reasons. Before we discuss why, here is a quick heads up on how it works.

Page Rank is based on links between your site and other sites. In fact specifically between web pages, since it is links between individual pages rather than complete websites that interests Google. That is because Google lists individual pages and not domains. There is a formula that Google uses to determine the value of each link to your site, which is based on the PageRank of the web page providing the link and also the number of other links leaving that page.

Dale King

[ktaylor310]

Dale, you and Torka seem to agree that more attention needs to be paid to invidual pages on a site as opposed to the "whole site theme", but you really part ways when it comes to the importance of page rank.

Quote from Torka:

Since PR is only one of many factors used to determine a page’s position in the search results, increasing the PR may or may not have any actual effect on rankings... Toolbar PR may, in fact, be a made-up number. "Real" PR is based on links. Nothing more, nothing less. But what is Toolbar PR based on? Many people seem to assume it’s based in some way on the "real" PR. But to my knowledge no one from Google has actually said this is true. Without access to the "real" PR numbers for verification, we have no way of knowing where the Toolbar PR number comes from. For all we can prove, it might as well be randomly generated.

Here's the way results stack up for our industry keywords right now:

#1 PR 4
#2 PR 5
#3 PR 5
#4 PR 4
#5 PR 4
#6 PR 4
#7 PR 3
#8 PR 3
#9 PR 4
#10 PR 5

Seems that - according to the "green bar" you rank better if you have a PR of 4 or 5, but it doesn't guarantee success as shown by the #9 and #10 listing.

Curious about other opinions...

[bonciutoma]

Hi,

My opinion is that page rank has a small importance in good positioning in a search done with Google. It can influence the position in relate to another page that has lower page ranks but since there are only 10 ranks and millions of web sites in my opinion it's better to concentrate on good content rather then building page rank or backlinks.

Thank you

[torka]

It's possible (unlikely, but possible) that the pages in the SERP you viewed are listed in "real PR" order. Problem is, the PR numbers you're looking at there are Toolbar PR, not real PR.

Real PR is a fractional number between zero and one, and it gets updated continuously. Real PR is used as one part of the ranking algorithm. Probably an important part, but still only one of over 100 different factors -- and there's no way on this green earth anyone from Google will disclose any details about how the current algorithm weights those 100+ factors.

In other words, there are enough other things that factor in to how a page ranks in the SERPs that PR alone can't possibly predict how a page will rank. Even if you were to somehow miraculously tap into Google and be able to find out what every page's PR number is at any give time, you still couldn't use that information to figure out what order those pages would rank in for any given query.

Toolbar PR, on the other hand, is a whole number between one and ten, and it gets updated about every three or four months or so. It is not used in the ranking algorithm at all. Not even a little teensy bit.

Bottom line, the PR number we can see is NOT the PR number that gets used for rankings, and it has little to no relationship to the PR number that is used for rankings.

This is not to say there's no information at all to be gleaned from looking at Toolbar PR. But it's not nearly as important as it sometimes gets made out to be.

--Torka

[lambert]

when PageRank is mentioned, it is most likely to have a positive effect on viewers. It's like PageRank, a trusted site, ranks well, etc. This is somehow the basis of article directories or those who are selling links.

[namanj]

Page rank is just a reputation mark over the web now. It does not impact too much on traffic building and rankings as well. If there is a good PR then more chances exist to get more link juice from webmasters in return otherwise try to work on social networking sites for more traffic building. Create quality backlinks and post quality content to your website, it will work enough.

[refernshare]

Does page rank depend on "one key word" or more than one? Not sure about it.

[chesa7]

Torka, you described "real" pagerank, but I'm not clear what that is? Is it a separate number kept by Google only? Is there any way to know what it is?

[jaugustat]

Backlinks, I keep hearing about that when talking about Page Rank. It is my understanding that backlinks are links on the individual pages that you are talking about, is that correct. How many backlinks are we talking about to get a PR on say page 1 or 2?

[torka]

Originally Posted by refernshare

Does page rank depend on "one key word" or more than one? Not sure about it.

Nope, PR is simply a number and is based on the number and "weight" of the links pointing to the page. It has nothing to do with keywords.

Originally Posted by chesa7

Torka, you described "real" pagerank, but I'm not clear what that is? Is it a separate number kept by Google only? Is there any way to know what it is?

Yes, it's a number kept internally by Google. Unlike the toolbar PR, the internal "real" PR is a fractional number between zero and one. It's determined on a page-by-page basis. Sometimes people talk about their site having a certain PR, but there's no such thing as "sitewide PR." Usually when somebody says that, they're actually talking about the toolbar PR of their site's home (default) page.

Because it's part of their ranking algorithm, they don't reveal it anywhere outside of Google. There's no way for any of us mere mortals to know what that number is. If there were, it would be way too easy for unscrupulous people to "game" the system.

Frankly, the very fact they let us see the Toolbar PR is the biggest indicator of how worthless that number is. If it were used for anything significant in their algorithm, they'd never display it in public.

Originally Posted by jaugustat

Backlinks, I keep hearing about that when talking about Page Rank. It is my understanding that backlinks are links on the individual pages that you are talking about, is that correct. How many backlinks are we talking about to get a PR on say page 1 or 2?

Backlinks are links from other pages that point to your page. Technically, they can be located on other pages on your own domain, or on some other domain, but most times people use the term to mean links from pages on some other domain.

A page's PR doesn't just depend on the number of links pointing to it. PR is also a measure of the "weight" of the links pointing to the page. In other words, generally speaking, a link on a page that has higher PR passes along more weight than a link on a page that has lower PR.

Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. Each page has a certain amount of PR in total it can confer on other pages. The more outbound links on that page, the less each individual link is "worth."

So a link from a page, when that's the only link on the page, is probably worth more than a link from another page that has the same PR, when there are dozens or hundreds of other links on the second page.

Of course, in real life there are a number of other factors that come into play which can make it even more complicated, including how the links are coded (such as whether some (or all) of the links on the page pointing to you have the "nofollow" attribute appended to them) and whether Google is allowing the page to pass its full potential link authority or if the page is operating under some kind of penalty, among other things.

The thing is, Google plays PR (the "real" PR, at least) very close to the chest.

It's impossible to say "how many links" you need to achieve any given PR number for a page, because we don't know what the real PR number is for the pages that link to you, we have no way of measuring how much PR each link passes along exactly, and we don't know what the real PR number is for your page (so we have no way of knowing when -- or if -- we've achieved the goal).

Fortunately, PR is just one aspect of the ranking algorithm, and it isn't necessary to know the real PR number of a page, or the amount of PR passed along by the links pointing to the page, in order to successfully optimize that page.

--Torka