How important is Google PageRank?

Posted in on 18 July 2005

Google uses a method called PageRank (PR) to decide how important a website is – but just how important is this? We would say that it is becoming less important.

Everytime that Google updates it’s PR scores, there’s a lot of discussion in search engine forums about the latest changes. Why has my PR decreased? How can I improve my website PR? Well, our view is that PR is not as important as it used to be and, in fact, you’d be better off concentrating your efforts on, for example, writing some good website content, streamlining your website code, and following web standards.

Why do we say this when common wisdom is that you should try to increase your PR by getting links from other websites? Well, firstly Google uses over 100 factors in its algorithm for ranking websites. PR is only one factor. Our opinion is that PR is not likely to be the most important factor.

Secondly, if you use a tool like Proogle, you wil notice that Google search results are NOT in descending order of PR. In fact, for any given keywords search, there are likely to be more important factors. For example, how and where the keywords are used in each website are more important in our view.

Sure, you can still ask other websites to link to your website, but we think you should only be doing this with websites that are relevant to yours and that will result in potential customers. It’s not worth spending a lot of time trying to get inbound links for any other reason!

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