I’m writing this post today in response to a comment made to my blog post titled “Who Cares About Google Pageank?

industrial adhesive Says:

interesting perspective on pagerank. it is considered by many to be the “currency” of the internet due to its far reaching influence. but i do tend to agree with you that it is somewhat overrated. what really should be the measuring stick to a site’s success is the relevant traffic it draws.

I’ve replied briefly to this comment, just to say that PR shouldn’t be seen as currency, as a currency it’s losing value even faster than the pound is at the moment - but I just wanted to delve deeper into why Google pagerank is no longer a currency worth investing in.

Firstly - Google pagerank is NOT ours to buy or sell.

When Google started to show us an indication of link popularity with the toolbar pagerank tool, they weren’t intending this to become currency, encouraging higher PR sites to sell backlinks to anyone willing to pay & thus effectively wreck their system of algorithmically determining the value of a website.

So Google have been working hard to devalue PR as a currency, they do not want PR being used to encourage backlink selling.

As the reply rightly states, the true currency online us TRAFFIC.

If you have a high traffic site, then your site is valuable, traffic IS yours to sell, and you should sell links based on the traffic you’ll pass - this is what Google want, and this is why they state that sold links should be NoFollow.

You may look at backlink from a PR5 website as being worth a lot of cash, due to the amount of currency there in terms of pagerank - but this website may actually be passing nothing at all.

The pagerank may drop significantly at the next PR toolbar update, or it may not - just because it doesn’t drop, doesn’t necessarily mean its still passing PR.

So - I would recommend that you stop looking at pagerank as currency - see traffic as currency, and see the pagerank toolbar as a pretty little decorative green line at the top of your browser if you like looking at it - or better still just get rid of PR from your toolbar.

When looking for backlinks, yes it is worthwhile looking at the PR of potential link sources - but remember that what you’re looking at is our of date, you don’t know if the site is actually passing PR, and if you’re just going for high PR sites & ignoring PR0 PR2 & PR3 sites, you may be actually ignoring PR3 or PR4 sites, because what you’re looking at is out of date info.

So look at a potential backlink source based on relevance & the quality of the site, and the quality & quantity of the backlinks into that site, and the number of outbound links on the page your link is likely to appear  - and focus on the quality of your site so that high quality sites will link to you even without you requesting - but don’t be lead astray by the little green bar!

Cheers

Kev

Tags: blog, blogging for linkjuice, blogging for pr, google link popularity, google page rank, google pr, internet marketing, link juice, link popularity, no follow, nofollow, search engine optimisation, SEO, SEO consultant

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under SEO Help & Tips. 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.