Google page rank has been the standard of measuring a website’s success for some time.
When interested in securing websites for linking purposes, quite a few webmasters still look for page rank level. This practice began to fall out of fashion when Google changed the way sites were indexed and how page rank worked.
New algorithms sent SEO professionals scrambling to figure out how to keep their clients happy. Pages were seeing drops in traffic and as a result, a drop in page rank. This scared many site owners who wondered how their earnings through certain programs would be affected or sales of product.
Today there are varying opinions on how important page rank is.
Page Rank Is Everything
Some people still hold to the idea that page rank is the driving force behind their popularity.
These site owners still seek links from other site owners, usually bloggers. It is very common to have site owners hire writers to place guest posts on blogs or other sites.
These posts have some sort of general information in them, geared toward the readers of the blog where the guest post is placed. The writers place links to their client’s site inside of the post. This is a newer form of link baiting.
Link baiting was used extensively in the early days of Google page rank. Site owners would write articles or blog posts solely for the purpose of having others link to it. This is still done to some extent.
Every site owner hopes that something they post goes viral which would lead people back to their site, increasing traffic and sales or possibly earnings from ad programs.
Link baiting today is harder than it was in the earlier days of SEO, as people today are more skeptical of what they read. Sensational headlines do not turn heads the way they once did.
Page Rank Is Meaningless
Well, perhaps not meaningless, but not as important as it once was.
According to some SEO strategists and Google, page rank is important for indexing purposes. The interesting information comes when the next part of the information is revealed: page rank, while important, is only one out of over two hundred signals used by Google to determine how the site stacks up on Google.
This means that page rank does not determine exactly where a site will show up in searches.
When a search is conducted through Google, keywords may help, page rank may help, but content that is relevant to the query is more important.
All signals will work together to bring a page up in search. Google does not release information on how the signals work because as soon as someone learns, this is when exploitation begins again.
We can gather that page rank is important, but not quite as important to search results as people in the first camp would like to believe.
For most site owners, instead of focusing on page rank, it is far more important in the Google race to provide quality, relevant content for potential readers or customers than to rely on incoming links alone.
