What Exactly Is Page Rank?
Sometimes a client will do some research and read about the “Google’s Page Rank” system. The client then uses this as the sole metric to measure their SEO success.
Wikipedia has a good explanation of Page Rank (PR), but simply it is part of Google algorithm for ranking websites. The ranking is on a 1 – 10 scale and the higher the score means the more powerful/influential the site.
Why Google Page Rank Is A Bad Metric
To answer my clients with this question I usually focus on the down sides of the Google Page Rank. The following are the biggest reasons why I don’t really look at Page Rank to closely.
Between 1 -10 which of the million of site is best?
The biggest flaw with the Google Page Rank scoring is that is a 1 – 10 metric. Out of all billions of sites on the world wide web how do you rank them with a 1 through 10? It’s not very helpful, especially because the a PR7 site is 10x greater than a PR6! The decimal, which they don’t show would be extremely helpful!
PR is only 1 metric in the Google algorigthm
Page rank use to be a lot more important in determining rank on Google, but now it’s 1 of over 200 factors! Focusing solely on someones PR isn’t very practical, and it’s especially hard to see a lot of movement once you get to the higher PR levels.
What’s Your Answer?
I would like to hear from you SEO experts on how you handle this question. Do you have statistics, analogies, or examples do you use to help your clients understand that PR is not the best metric to measure SEO results.
If you have questions or solutions that you think would help other SEO’s please leave them in the comments below. You can also follow @ben_beck on Twitter with the tag #seofaq all this week.
About Benjamin Beck
I work as a SEO Associate for SEER Interactive where I tackle getting my clients better rankings on search engines. I like finding creative new ways of marketing online through SEO and social media. When I am not working I enjoy micro-lending and checking tasks off of my bucket list.
