Web Blog of Greg Mathews

PR (Page Rank) is a figure generated against your web page by Google.

According to wikipedia

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of EPR(E).

This all sounds very impresive and webmasters everywhere strive to get a good PR for their site, but I ask, what is so importent about it? how does it effect your site?

Google do not give full details of how they calculate PR nor what they do with it. Many rightly or wronly believe your site’s PR effects how well it is indexed on Google but I question this.

Take two of my sites, one is a PR 4 site, it has links coming in from other sites and it is established, but if you search for a related search term on Google it will be found quite a way down the results. The 2nd site has a PR 0, it has very few links pointing to it from other sites and it has only been around for 4 months. When you search Google for related terms it comes up on page 1.

Now I accept the two sites are completely different, and the number of ‘competative’ sites all competing for top spot varies drastically with site 1 having to compete with a lot more sites, but surely should this not be reflected in the PR value assigned to a site?

Personally I am not like many other webmasters, I don’t go out of my way to improve my page rank, if the site is indexed well in the search engines and getting the traffic I want for the site then I am happy.

What do you think about Page Rank and is it important to you?