nav-left cat-right
cat-right

Page-Rank or Search engine Ranking?...

Posted by admin in SEO on October 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Last week I had a discussion with my SEO team lead about one of the most controversial things in SEO business—Ah, the page-rank. I still remember the time when I had been interviewed by few SEO companies, “So how soon can you get me a Google page-rank of 1”, was the question raised with a sense of pride by one of the managers. I didn’t care to tell him that it works the other way (higher the number the better), I instead told him I cannot promise and that such things should not be on top of the “agenda” when working for a client. Result—everything that I had piled up till then (in the interview) crashed without a noise, as if I had attached a rank to my face but couldn’t live up to their expectation when I did not say what they expected to hear. You see the point?

My team lead had to say the following things:

  • Page rank is controversial
  • Lots of people doing business are promising page rank for websites
  • Page rank adds almost no value to your business in the end
  • It does NOT help in getting your page to the top in the SERPs
  • Google might decide someday to totally do away with the concept of page-rank

Although I understand the emotion behind his words (even he knows that!), we do know that page-rank has its place when it comes to SEO, although its value is over-rated for sure by people who especially do not belong to the industry. Surely, it shouldn’t be one of the factors for rejecting a company for your SEO project.

Here is a bit of demystification:

1)      When lots of sites are competing for the same keywords to get into the SERPs (given that other factors are evened out), the one with higher page rank will get higher priority.

2)      Sites with higher PR are served with “high-value” add sense ads.

3)      Google bot will crawl the website with higher PR more often that the ones with lower PR, as a result more pages of higher PR site will be indexed more.

That is why specialists exist, why don’t you change your question next time around—“How soon can you get me into the first page of SERPs for my keyword?”

Now I have raised another controversy, haven’t I?