Is Page Rank a valuable tool
See also previous article How is Page Rank calculated
Is page rank a valuable tool, and if so who for?
Among webmasters, the general thought is that page rank is not especially useful at indicating the importance of a site, for two reasons:
1) Page Rank can be ‘bought’ by buying links on high page rank sites
2) Position in the search engine results is not a direct reflection of page rank, since many other factors (eg content of the page) are also taken into account.
But what about the use of Page Rank for the general public, who know nothing abought links and SEO? I believe that Page Rank continues to be a valuable tool for everyday internet surfers, despite the shortcomings above. This is based on my observations from looking at the thousands of sites submitted to the bigtangle directory.
If a site submitted to the directory is high Page Rank (say PR6-8), it is almost always a reference site in its category, easy to use and navigate, and a good source of information, built up over a considerable period of time. I don’t recall ever rejecting a site in this category.
Sites with PR4-5 are usually pretty well laid out and presented, again with useful information, although typically less so than the very top sites. These sites are occasionally rejected. The same trend continues with sites PR1-3. These tend to be newer, smaller sites, of lower quality than the PR4-8 sites, and are more often rejected.
PR0 sites are sometimes new, and not yet ranked because of that. But very often as soon as a PR0 site opens it is immediately clear that it is a MFA (made for adsense) site, or a site made from hastily thrown together affiliate links and/or articles. Such sites will rarely rank highly because no-one will link to them, directories will reject them and so on.
In fact the whole directory submission process, often criticised, almost certainly helps google in this respect, because it helps to keep poor sites ranking low, with few links, and boosts the ranking of useful, informative sites. Taken together, we directory owners are acting as the world’s biggest and best ’site-ranking’ system possible!
Now before you set upon me with a list of exceptions, I also know of PR7 sites with no useful information at all, and PR0 sites that should be ranked higher. I know of Wikipedia ’stub’ pages that are PR6 and have no information on at all, likewise many pages in about.com and sites of that nature that are hopelessly overranked.
But given that google have to attribute Page Rank to billions of pages, using automated computer software, I suggest that for ‘the man in the street’ the Page Rank shown in the toolbar really is quite a useful indication of the importance of a site, if not the individual pages within a site.