One of the most commonly talked about aspects of search engine marketing, is Google Pagerank.

The questions I’m very often being asked is “how do I increase my pagerank” “Why is my Google PR low” “What has happened, my Google Pagerank has dropped through the floor, what did I do?” or “how do I get high PR backlinks?”

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By the way - if your website has suffered a drop in PR after a recent toolbar PR update and you know you’ve done something that’s against Google’s terms, then it’s probably safe assumption that this is the cause, especially if you lost positions some time before the toolbar update.

If this is the case just focus on doing good SEO, making sure you don’t continue to break Google’s Terms.

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I’m going to say something now that will probably cause people to gasp with disbelief!

IGNORE GOOGLE PAGERANK!

Yep that’s right - forget about it.

Focus on the value that your website delivers in terms of the quality of the content and/or the features that your website offers to your visitors, focus on gaining relevant & high quality backlinks (which means backlinks from other sites which are focusing on delivering value, and gaining high quality backlinks)

Focus on making sure that Google are indexing all your pages, focus on your stats (use google analytics, because it’s ace, and free!)  Focus on the tools that are available free in your google webmasters account.

But ignore the google toolbar pagerank. 

In the past I’ve said that pagerank is important - and it still is important, but what is not important is toolbar PR - and unless you happen to have a buddy who works at Google, who’s willing to risk his job at probably the best employer ever (they have swimming pools, pool tables, and let you work on your own projects in company time, how cool??) by leaking real pagerank data to you - which is very very unlikely ;-), then you’re never going to know what your website’s real Pagerank is.

The toolbar pagerank is only updated every so often, and to no particular schedule really - just as & when Google feel like they need to do it, so usually its out of date info you’re looking at.

But even when it is updated - you’re never going to get an exact picture of the pagerank to any site - Google have no real reason to do this, but many good reasons not to.

Think about it, people have been using pagerank as a tool to value backlink selling, which is something Google do not like, so they’re not likely to want to help people to do this, in fact they’re more likely to want to hinder people who’re using PR as a link selling tool - so the PR toolbar is never going to be anything but a rough gauge.

It’s not a particularly bad thing to do to look at Pagerank as a very rough rule of thumb when looking to gain important backlinks - but I would advise not to even do this, because this often leads people to ignore many great potential sources of backlinks, which have a low toolbar pagerank for whatever the reason may be (could just be that the site has been very active since the last PR update) - but do actually have the potential to give the site a real boost in link popularity.

It also sometimes causes people to waste energy focusing on trying to get backlinks with seemingly important websites which have lost their importance.

What I mean by that, is that high PR directories for example - some of them may show that they have a high pagerank, (which may well change after another toolbar update) BUT if  they have been selling backlinks, Google may not trust them as a voter towards link popularity, so they may have stopped this website from passing on anything of value via their outbound links, regardless of what the toolbar is currently showing their pagerank as.

So personally I think that for most people, Pagerank is NOT a good tool to use, it leads people astray, and has people focusing on the wrong things.

So ignore pagerank.

Just focus on the value your website is offering, this in & of itself will help you to gain backlinks from high quality important websites within your niche - and focus on gaining as many decent backlinks as you can, and avoid the pitfalls of trying to loophole you’re way to search engine traffic by trying to outsmart Google - unless you happen to be Stephen Hawking, you’re unlikely to be able to outsmart Google for the longterm!

Tags: analytics, backlinking, best employer, google page rank, google pr, google seo, ignore google pr, ignore pagerank, link juice, link popularity, pagerank, pr toolbar, pr toolbar update, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, SEO, SEO consultant, web marketing

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 6:04 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.