Why PageRank Is No Longer Impotent For Ranking

PageRank used to be a indicator of how well a website was doing. Although there is sometime's a link to page rank and rankings it is not always the case. I found the following article on the subject

by RODOLFO URBANO

Having a good PageRank (PR) has many benefits, not only does it provide organic traffic to your site (free traffic brought by search engines), but it also gives value, esteem and respect to your website as a whole. Large sums of money and countless hours are being spent to acquire a decent PR, and some SEO companies are doing things to the extent which are not ethical or not in compliance with certain policies just to achieve them like Black Hat SEO.

One of Google's basis on how websites' PR is calculated are the quality of links pointing to the web pages of a website. These links are counted by Google as votes and the more quality backlinks your website acquires the better and higher its PR will be. All links are not created equal, the quality of each link depends upon the reputation of the website which it came from and it will be evaluated by Google in the calculation of PR. Acquiring and maintaining a good PR is a continuous process, it needs patience, takes time and money, needs plenty of work but the end results are worth it.

Having a good PR increases your website's chance in being listed at the front page of the search results. This means you have an advantage with your competitors when internet users search something relevant to your site's products, services or information. This will save you lots of money from advertisements because having a good PR will boost your website's popularity in the long run, acquiring targeted potential customers and increasing your sales and conversion rate.

The PR of your website also determines its value. The higher is your site's PR the more valuable it becomes. It only shows that reputable websites are linking to yours for various reasons. Mainly it may be the quality of your website's content, support, relevance, importance, quality and no matter what other reasons there may be, having a high PR will definitely make your website valuable and reputable.

This statement by Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst explains why Pagerank should not be considered as a good indicator any-more. many web masters and some SEO's still wrongly obsess with this statistic.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it”

Pagerank has been removed from the Webmasters Toolkit but google has kept it in the google toolbar mainly to stop some webmaster creating a storm. it seems that some still need the little security blanket that is the PageRank indicator in the tool bar