Does PageRank Matter?

According to John Scott, and others, PageRank still matters. PageRank has been the subject of discussion as of late, with some SEO types insisting that PageRank no longer matters. PageRank, while it may seem arbitrary and useless, is still indicative of linkage, which is one of the primary factors in determining ranking.

Matt Cutts, a Google Engineer, says:

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.

So the little green bar you see on your Google Toolbar might not be quite worth obsessing about every minute of the day, it is indicative of other things going on with your site, mainly backlinks.  The higher the number of backlinks, and the more quality sites these are from, the higher your PageRank is likely to be.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 7:16 pm and is filed under SEO Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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