Google PR Lookup Junkie? Don't... it's Greenbar Madness
Are you always checking your PageRank? Can't get away from it? Just one more Google PR Lookup?
In the quest to get your website’s Google PR (PageRank) up ‘just one more notch’ it’s all too easy to lose track of its actual search-ranking performance.
Make no mistake, although a high Google PR helps your website to perform better, it does not necessarily guarantee high search rankings, because it's just one of over two-hundred signals Google uses to establish a web page's search ranking for any given keyword or phrase.
Before you do yet another pointless Google PR Lookup, here's a secret:
Google PageRank is actually named after its inventor, Larry Page, and not in fact its overall impact on a web page's real-term search rank.
Not a lot of people know that... and so the Greenbar Madness spreads.
Take as an example the heavily contested key-phrase ‘Properties for sale in Cyprus’, which returns 17,300,000 results at Google.co.uk. PR within the top 10 search results for this term is as follows:
4/10
2/10
3/10
3/10
1/10
0/10
2/10
3/10
2/10
4/10
Although the Google PR in these rankings starts predictably enough with the PR4 site outperforming the second-placed PR2 result, we already start to find anomalies from the third result onwards. If Google PR really is the be-all-and-end-all of search ranking, why is that PR2 website beating a couple of PR3s?
Then there is the other PR4 website ranked 10th, but being outdone by something without any PR at all, which is ranked 6th. Surely if PageRank was the be-all and end-all of web promotion, the second PR4 site should be at the head of the listing, or at the very least in second place? The PR0 site, on the other hand, should be nowhere in sight, because when we do a quick Google PR Lookup on result number eleven, we find it to have a PageRank of 3.
The simple fact is that Google themselves state that although their PageRank score is a fair indicator of a site’s overall importance, its actual ranking within the search engine’s results for any given key-phrase is determined by over two-hundred factors, not least of which being the presence of relevant, high-quality content.
Yet in spite of this, there is a continuing trend by webmasters towards getting ‘just one more’ rank upgrade.
Stop this Greenbar Madness!
By all means concentrate on gathering inbound links, and increasing your site’s PageRank, but do not turn that little green bar at the top of Internet Explorer™ or Firefox into the centre of your SEO universe. Ensure that your site is easy to navigate, add rich and unique content, incorporate a discussion forum to encourage external input, and clean up its HTML code; these are all means by which to increase the overall quality of your web site, and positively affect its actual search ranking.
No matter what some SEO Experts may say, successful web promotion is about so much more than mere Google PR.
Taking a balanced approach with consideration to the many different components required for the success of your site will pay far greater dividends in the long run than a short-term sprint towards just one more Google PR Lookup…
Please note: All search-results and Google PageRank references given as part of this article are correct at the time of an editorial update carried out on December 1st 2009.
