While PageRank might not be all that important to your site, it is important how your site is perceived by others. PR used to be _the_ way to measure the value of a site and that kinda stuck.<p>> I’ve seen folks spend thousands of dollars per month on links or advertising on a site simply because ‘the site has a great PageRank’.<p>Me too, so if you are a site that thrives on advertising or link revenue, PageRank remains very important.<p>Avvo.com said that when their PageRank rises, so do the number of business development calls. Even when PR and business dev calls are not correlated, the perception is still very real.<p>For larger sites having a higher PageRank also means deeper crawls, longer crawls and faster recrawls (I've heard it influence rich snippets and sitelinks too.). Not something to measure like it is the holy grail of marketing, but it is something to keep an eye out for, even if it just to check if you are not ranked 0 (which could mean a serious problem).<p>I wouldn't put my money where my mouth is, if PageRank doesn't matter, I still prefer links from higher PageRank domains. PageRank might be dead, it is not buried yet.
><i>Think about that—somewhere in Mountain View, someone’s tweaking the little number you see in the Google toolbar. By hand. How accurate is that gonna be?</i><p>Certainly more accurate than software failure. Here's the relevant snippet from the source to this claim:<p>><i>We have a few safety checks in place, so we say like `OH! Did we expect the page rank of MSN.com to be 7 or 8 and then suddenly dropped to 2...'</i><p>><i>If those sorts of things happen, then we might get an email and check into it. But for the most part the process runs with very little human intervention. People don't really need to oversee things.</i><p>The author doesn't show much comprehension of PageRank which is not intended to be a metric solely used for "site ranking" but for crawling rate amongst other things. It's common for lower PR pages to outrank higher PR pages in Google's search results let it be no secret.<p>Can someone remind me the point of this article because it feels like I completely missed it.
Page Rank is the great red herring that keeps many SEOs busy with unimportant stuff.<p>PR doesn't boost your rankings, doesn't give you more traffic, doesn't convert prospects to buyers... and yet so many people obsess over it.<p>Unless you sell links to people who don't have a clue, PR is useless. And if you are selling these kinds of links, you're probably a spammer, not an SEO.
I agree with everything in this blog post but I won't be sharing it with anyone. I want to educate people, not berate them - can anyone recommend a similar post, but friendlier?
>If you never use the phrases people use to find your products, though, you’re still not going to get found.<p>Do people still think like this? Like it's 1997 and you have to find the right keywords to rank high? What exactly is the purpose of SEO anyway? It's not like cat-v.org uses SEO and that information comes up fine. If you're trying to advertise for a business instead of showing content then you can just... buy ads. Is it for bloggers trying to get pageviews?