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How Important is PageRank? | | | Google PageRank is very important for all webmasters because in this way they guarantee traffic to their web sites. PageRank is so important because it is a decisive factor in how high a particular webpage ranks within the Google search results. The higher is the PageRank, the better. Gaining profits is the webmasters' goal and that is why they worry so much about Google PageRank as Google is today's most powerful search engine. I guess that now the important matter is not why they are worrying so mush but how important is PageRank actually?
Webmasters say that there are other crucial factors which determine profits and traffic to their websites besides PageRank. They claim that recently keyword density and placement have proven to be almost as important as PageRank was. However, they do not suppose that PageRank has lost its power and has become irrelevant but the truth is that PageRank is not as important of a factor in website ranking as it used to be.
I will try to explain you why PageRank is losing popularity. To do this I used a tool (you can find it at prlookup.com). This tool gives you the regular Google results for the keywords you have typed in but it displays the pagerank for every webpage as well. Using this tool you can find the websites that rank well for any keywords or key phrases. What surprised me when I tried this tool is that some websites with low pagerank were higher in the results than other with high pagerank. Soon I realized what has caused this. The surprising results were due to the content of the web pages. The position of a particular website in the list depends on how many times, and in what manner, the keywords you have typed in actually appear on the webpage. Google uses keywords and their density in order to choose which websites should be in its search results.
| | | The results that this tool gave made me realize that Pagerank is not the only decisive factor of website ranking on Google. It proved that there are more dominant factors such as keyword usage and density in webpage content, title, and the URL which determine webpage ranking. Moreover, I noticed that even Google includes in its first page of results web pages that had absolutely no PageRank at all (PR 0)! As well, for some of the keywords I typed in I received results with reverse-order PageRanks. I mean that the first result that Google gave had lower PageRank than the following results as for example PR8, 7, 6, 6, 5 and so on.
The thing that probably you are asking yourself is whether the average webmaster concerned with SEO is interested in PageRank in any way. Actually, most webmasters are worrying about other non-PageRank factors such as keywords and density much more than about PageRank itself. This is so because webmasters know that keywords and their density can place PR6 site above a PR8 site in the results. However, I am not trying to convince you that webmasters are worrying about links at all. On the contrary, web owners are constantly trying to obtain as much links as possible. But they know that the time they spend trying to obtain link to their websites could be better spent improving website content and optimizing keywords instead.
Talking about keywords I must add that having keywords in the website title and URL ranks websites much higher sometimes. However, by improving the web pages content you are going to enjoy a double-effect - not only that you will produce keyword rich web pages good for both surfers and search engines but you will improve your PageRank by obtaining one-way links.
As a conclusion I'll sum up that pagerank is important indeed but web owners should not worry about it too much. Today other decisive components such as keywords have proven to be a matter of equal consideration. The thing that webmasters should worry about is content because good content is the best and the fastest way to improve website ranking. Good content attracts more viewers even without a great PageRank.
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