Since writing my “Why Your PageRank Doesn’t Matter” article just this morning, there have been a number of really great comments from a few of my regular readers and I wanted to clear the air about my article.

As I stated in the article, my opinion of the TBPR (toolbar pagerank) is that it is not worth obsessing over. Your time is much better spent creating content fit for HUMANS instead of losing sleep over something that is outdated and inaccurate you could be doing something productive with your website.

Maybe I Wasn’t Clear:

Isaac from GoBlogger (who I read and respect as a blogger) brought up some points that led me to think i wasn’t clear in my article. I don’t want any new or experienced blogger or webmaster to think I am discounting the value of “true” PR. What I do discount, is bloggers and webmasters obsessing and writing about it to the point that some uneducated noob blogger thinks that he must rush out to every link directory and submission site to get as many links as possible to get some TBPR. It is wrong on our parts to exude this worship over Google, and yes Isaac, they know we do it and they love to keep us guessing.

I admit that I also obsess over it at times too. But after the last few months of researching, and then bringing some logic to the table, I came to realize that my obsession with this false ranking was part of a driving force in letting my content fall off. It is utterly stupid on my part. Then I started to notice this obsession all over the net about PR link this, and PR that, it is a waste of time!

Some Quotes From Matt Cutts:

Here are some quotes from Matt Cutts on the topic of PageRank:

When asked about he fact that Google can only create a PR update that is a full quarter behind the times is awfully troubling he replied:

I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users

What he is saying is that the “internal” Pagerank is updated continuously but only exported occasionally.

When Matt was asked Will this PR update affect SERPs? he responded:

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.

This is the statement that I want to emphasize. When I was saying “your PR doesn’t matter” I was telling the truth. It really doesn’t. It is not a true measure of anything accurate or important other than the fact that you worked hard to get some links. Does toolbar PR mean your site has content that is better? Does toolbar PR mean that you will get more SE traffic? Does it really mean anything? No it really doesn’t matter.

While it is generally conceded that these days Google places much less importance on PageRank as a ranking factor (some estimate that its present weight may be no more than 5-10%) it is still one of the factors to be considered in increasing your ranking, and has grown (through the Google Toolbar making a mutated form of PR visible) to be a factor of considerable economic importance to webmasters.

What makes a site good? Is it PageRank? Is it Alexa? Is it number of links? What do you think?

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