This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under PageRank, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Really, should you care about PageRank?
Everyone has recently gone mad over the latest Google PageRank update. However I believe that many of our “not so hard-core seo” users are fearing for the wrong reasons. We recieve seo and text link questions every day and I find myself repeating the same thing: “No visitor is really going to care about your PageRank.”
Getting more trafic to your site is the main overall objective. If your #1 for Autos or #5 for Chicago BMW it really does nto matter as long as you keep the focus on how you convert the traffic in to sales. Improving the quality of your traffic will convert more and do a lot more toward helping your business.
Google has never said that PR (Page Rank) means one site is “better.” than another. PR is nothing more than a way of measuring the cumulative strength of the links pointing to your page. (Listen up- its about back-links to your site. This means links that can be counted by search engines, not sidebar, footer bar or “No Follow” links - real links in content - contextual links get crawled and pass juice). It says nothing about whether the content on that page is actually useful, or whether that page has been optimized to attract interested ready-to-buy people, or whether the site navigation and page layout are doing all they can to “funnel” visitors toward a purchase. It doesn’t measure bounce rates or clickthroughs or conversions.
Now the Internet Explorer or Firefox toolbar PR actually has almost nothing to do with the quality of the site. All it measures is how good the site owner is at enticing other people to link in, less any penalties Google decides to impose. As it happens, there are plenty of low toolbar PR pages that outrank pages with higher toolbar PR, so increasing your toolbar PR won’t even necessarily get you any higher rankings or more traffic.
So don’t keep focusing on improving PR to “improve your business” rather focus on improving your site to make it more credible and link-worthy. “Optimize” your copy. Optimize for better conversions. Promote your site in other websites and directories that are visited by real humans who are interested in what you have to offer. You may get higher PR on the tool bar from doing so- maybe not. Fact of the matter is that you’ll be too busy shipping orders and answering sales calls to care.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.