Google PageRank

Google PageRank

A lot has been made of Google’s PageRank Indicator, as many of you have witnessed if you have the Google Toolbar installed. The PageRank indicator is the horizontal white bar on the toolbar, filled arbitrarily in green in accordance with the PageRank of the website you are visiting. PageRannk is a measure of a website’s importance, according to Google, on a scale of 0-10 (10 being a phenomenally important website).

However, when it comes right down to it, the PageRank metric is not an indicator of website quality or ranking. Though much hype was published about it when it first came out, webmasters and those in the know quickly figured out that a website’s PageRank had very little bearing on how a website performed in search results. It is simply an interpretation of incoming link structure, and as Google itself has been quoted saying, PageRank is not something webmasters should be focusing on a whole lot, and its definitely not the most important metric for webmasters to track when it comes to optimizing their site for searches. For many, this was all they needed to hear and jumped off the PageRank bandwagon with arms and legs flailing. Don’t be so quick to judge, though – PageRank can be a handy tool allowing you to make informed web-surfing decisions. When online shopping at a new site, I often find my eyes being drawn to the site’s PageRank, as safer, more secure and more credible sites tend to have higher PageRanks than “riskier” sites. Ultimately, though I wouldn’t recommend focusing on improved PageRank as part of an SEO strategy, I would use it as a research tool. Plus, when any half decent SEO strategy gets put into action, improved PageRank is a natural inevitability.

To put things in perspective, a PageRank of 5 out of 10 is very good for just about any website – the overwhelming majority of sites are ranked 2 or less. Typically, some of the highest PageRank sites are established organizations and institutions of higher learning (consistent with the amount of incoming links pointing to them).

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