Google Page Rank

Wed, 24 August, 2005 – 8:50 pm

In my own opinion, Google's Page Rank of a site is not worth worrying about. From what I've read, the Page Rank system is Google's opinion of the importance of your web site. This importance is measured by the quality of the content as well as the number of other sites linking to it and their importance can be a factor as well. Of course this is all hearsay and I've read contradicting reports about how, if you link to high PR sites you'll be deemed more important (anyone can link to the BBC though can't they!), others say if you link to a low PR site you'll lose some of your PR to that site. The PR of an external site linking to yours doesn't affect your PR, a high PR site linking to you increases your PR etc etc.

So taking all of this into account, how come I have a client's web site, that has now been online for about a year, have a PR of 4, when it is a Photo Gallery site, so the only content are photo titles (I gave up nagging the client to write some content) and alt attributes, and only recently has it acquired it's first link from a very hidden page on the Bristol University web site.

Yes Google has indexed the photos and it gets a few hits from the Google Image search, but that's about all. Anyone care to give a reason? After over 6 months of being online it had no backlinks, about 20 indexed pages in Google and a PR of 4.

I read, at least once a week, someone asking about the PR system. How can they improve it, someone else saying theirs is 5 and they want to up it to 6 or 7. Another client's website has a PR of 5. This has stacks backlinks, 300+ pages indexed and 3000+ visitors a day. I don't see it's PR causing it a problem at all, not that I'm saying the PR is dependent on visitor numbers and clicks through Google. But it proves a small point that the PR makes no difference to how many visitors you can expect to receive, no difference to your position in the search results page. All it seems to be is a little green bar on most people's browsers that give people a cause for concern.

Don't get me wrong, the BBC, Yahoo, Cafepress, all have a PR of 9/10 (at last check), and these are high profile sites with thousands of back links. But for any general site, in fact for any site, I wouldn't worry about it, to be perfectly honest, just ignore it.

If you do want to track the PR of a collection of sites, Digital Point offers a free tool which uses the Google API (a free key you can sign up for, details on the Digital Point site) to check the positioning for your sites on various key phrases and also tells you the site's PR, number of indexed pages and number of back links. You can add multiple sites to this list, saves time visiting every site you run and inflating your statistics ;o)

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