It would seem that at last we have seen a PageRank update and whilst there are many bloggers celebrating this as their rank has risen, is it really something that we need? Although I may go into the SEO elements of the toolbar in a bit of detail I will try and keep this as close to the bloggers perspective as possible.
Improvements
Arriving on your blog and spotting that you have moved up a notch or two in the world of PageRank is fantastic but is it something you really should have been surprised about? If you are a keen blogger and you are posting well thought out content on a weekly if not daily basis then surely over the last eight months your site has been gaining power anyway? You should be constantly assessing your traffic and your backlinks to see if people really give a damn about what you are saying. Don’t discount comments either, replying to a comment could earn you another life time reader.
If you are consistently tweaking the site around your market then you don’t even need to consider PageRank right? Well no, also not true.
Advertising
Okay so we all know that Google doesn’t encourage paid ads on a site right? Well yes and no. If you are thinking about doing this then make sure the ads are no follow and in Google’s eyes you are fine. Then you need to target the right market for your site. So what do you think people are going to be paying for, a high PageRank site or a site with little or no PageRank? You guessed it and this is partly why a lot of bloggers have been crying out for an update for a long time.
Important To An Search Engine Marketer?
You will notice that a lot of SEOs have not really been too fussed about what happens with the PagRank tool and this is because they have other means of assessing the strength of a site and whether it is worth gaining a link from. As the Google tool very rarely gets updated what is the point in an SEO relying on something like this? I know that I personally had no worries as to whether or not Google wiped it from the public eye.
It is not something they will ever take away internally though and this is important to note.
The fact is that even Google have said that PageRank is not the most important tool for assessing the strength of a site (why they removed it from Webmaster Tools in 2009). The fact is that for some people it is what makes them strive forward to make the site better and gain more readers.
My opinion is that by updating it on a more constant basis they are nor harming anyone, if they think they are putting SEOs off manipulating it then they are wrong because there are of course better tools out there.
What do you think about PageRank, should Google have updated it again or is it something better left behind?
Thank you for this detailed report. We wish to contribute, but really our key contributions are images (of our new floral designs), not words. Is there any equivalent of an image rank?
As we’re a ‘black bar’ – come as no surprise we’re not a big page rank fan. I’ve seen that several blogs have ‘borrowed’ images from others – not in a bad way, but didn’t credit the photographer either. -Koko
PR is certainly not as important anymore and I think that in 2-3 years it won’t matter at all. What Google will look at would be the profile of the author of the site, how he writes and what do people think of him.
The links coming in will still be important but also the likes and tweets a site receives will count a lot in rankings.