Google Page Rank – Sometimes it’s a Joke…

Google Page Rank. I swear nothing sparks more conversation among web/blogheads than that little green bar in the browser. Google recently “updated” PR, and of course that’s got people talking. In reality, PR is continuously updated, but the Toolbar PR indicator is only updated every 3 – 4 months. (And before some SEO “wizard” jumps all over me, I don’t just make this stuff up. Google’s own Matt Cutts made this point. He’s a pretty bright guy, with some really good inside connections at the Googleplex. I believe him.)

Personally, I think Google PR is over-rated. I’ve seen some horrific sites with decent PR. (Example to follow…). Some SEO/webmaster people fixate on Google PR like it’s the only thing that matters. In fact, it’s but one of more than 100 different factors Google uses to score web pages. (more of Matt’s wisdom, not mine)

Despite Matt’s advice to not obsess over PR, people do. Like this commenter on Matt’s blog:

I’d love to see PageRank to be more accurate on highly dynamic websites. ATM it seems PR inheritance is based mostly on URL-depth (delimited by / ) instead of true link-depth. Our mainsite has PR4 while links to dynamic pages from that page usually have PR0 at best. The target-page content is always static we’re just using mod_rewrite to hide highly parameterized URLs.

Whew. I read that six times and it’s still gobbledy-gook to me.

Rather then try to decipher all that PR inheritance, highly parameterized URL stuff just to make a little green bar get bigger, I think I’ll stick to my own extremely technical Search Engine Optimization strategy:

Write content that people need, in a way they can understand it.

I know that’s incredibly deep and profound. But seriously, if you’ve got a web site what’s more important — having something your visitors need, or busting your butt hoping a green bar that most people don’t even know is there slides up a notch every now and then?

If Google PR is so all fired important, someone PLEASE explain this to me. Our main web site has been on-line over two years and has about 300 pages of content. The website gets daily updates. There are a lot of good “backlinks” to it. It ranks very well for many key terms in Google. It has a Google PR of 4, which isn’t too shabby. I can live with it. This very blog has a PR of 5 (up from 4 in this most recent update). I can live with that too.

Here’s where I struggle, and why it seems to me that often Google PR is a worthless measure of a web site. What if I told you I know of a real estate blog that has a grand total of 5 (yes, FIVE) posts. It only has one backlink from a PR 0 site. Here are the dates of the five posts that comprise this entire blog:

• June 5, 2003
• June 6, 2003
• November 23, 2003
• April 2, 2004
• April 12, 2006

That’s it. 5 posts in almost three and a half years. 653 total words in the blog, the last one of which entered six months ago. For comparison, there are 653 words in this POST (by design naturally ) It is, by anyone’s definition, a pitiful blog. (hat tip to RSSPieces for locating this gem. How they found it is beyond me.)

So what is the Google Page Rank of this masterpiece of a blog? It’s a PR 4 site. Same as my web site, same as this blog was just a week ago.

Sorry folks, you can argue PR importance until you are blue in the face. PR appears to me to be useless. I’d *love* to hear a reasonable explanation of why this real estate blog with it’s 653 words of content in 3.5 years is a PR 4 site.

[tags]Google PR, SEO, Real Estate Blog[/tags]

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