Is Pagerank Important
Discussions about the importance of pagerank are ever present, so I thought I’d offer my thoughts on the subject.
Everyone is agreed, I think, that we can rank well for an easy-moderately competitive phrase with a page with low toolbar page rank, and often outrank pages with higher pagerank. Let’s say the phrase is ‘is pagerank important’.
To get started on ranking well for this phrase I’ll need some links from relevant pages. Other things being equal, it seems easier in my experience to achieve this if these relevant pages have high PR.
I have often seen a SERPS improvement a couple of days after getting a high PR link, seldom after a new PR0 link. I believe that if MattCutts linked to this page from his blog with the link text ‘Is PageRank Important’ that would be enormously more successful at improving my SERPS than if a new unknown site did the same.
My new page will still be showing PR0 on the toolbar, of course, because the PR that we see on the toolbar is not the PR that google are using in their systems - the toolbar PR is only updated/exported every few months.
As a result of this initial success in the SERPS more people who are interested in ‘is pagerank important’ will find my page, and more people writing about ‘is pagerank important’ will link to my page.
The net result is, the page rank of my page will rise because of these backlinks. The backlinks will also tend to use anchor text around the same phrase, which will help reinforce and improve further my position in the SERPS.
So the position isn’t just that we need pagerank to get higher SERPS. More importantly it is that we also get higher PR as a consequence of our position in the SERPS.
So after an initial push to get a page found in the first place, PR is the effect of the SERPS position and the popularity of the page, not the cause.
Which is, I imagine, how google intend it should be.
Chasing PR for the sake of it is therefore not the goal and serves little purpose, but chasing links from relevant pages with PR is important, because these are pages that have demonstrated that they are themselves considered important.
As an aside, I think that - for now at least - links from a well categorised, well ranked directory do count as relevant links, and can be a significant help in improving SERPS positions.