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My take on the Pagerank / Position Situation

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by admin on December 22, 2008

While I know that this is not a very widely accepted opinion of the current PageRank over position debate, I wanted to give my 2 cents!

Page Rank, or the little green bar on the Google toolbar which gives your site a ranking from N/A – 10 has been around for a good long time now.

Originally it was clear and apparent that Google PageRank was a direct correlation to how Google viewed your site, your positioning, and overall just how well your site was performing.

Then, after (roughly) a year long period of algo changes, google decided it was time to lay the final blow on spam sites, porn, pharmacy, and link farming.

Here is what I believe was the outcome of those changes, and where I expect to see PageRank end up in the future.

Google has stopped allowing us as SEO’s to use page rank as a determining factor on sites position, and while having a 7PR is still a notable accomplishment, it is not the end-all be-all for SEO any longer.

It is clear that there is a wedge driven between your sites PageRank and the position that you achieve in the SERPs for instance, Post Florida update, after all the pharmacy and junk got purged from google, you can see that even sites with a overall low (2,3,4)PageRank were crawling to the top. Essentially, the linking structures which were causing the bloating of PageRank began to fall away, leaving sites that were more about the content richness and quality of information… exactly what google wanted. Now , Years later , there are still debates as to how important PageRank is to your website. I am going completely against the grain , and stating that PageRank has become a way of determining link popularity… but not in any way directly correlating to your SERP placements. I know I KNOW all the Search Marketing pros out there are most likely going to behead me for this… but you can get great rankings by just coding cleanly, and creating regular, unique and compelling content before you ever place a single reciprocal link. That being said, there is nothing wrong with same “niche” reciprocal linking … SEOs can link anywhere within the “house” of web development and gain PR, however it wont always determine your Authority or relevance in your industry. For those of you who want to argue this point out… and show me how many large PR sites they have WITH position … ask yourself, if you just stuck to subject, knew your Sh** and never got a single reciprocal or 3way link to your site … would it really change your positions?