Why the stress over PageRank?

maybe I don't quite get it...

[TWhalen]

I have been doing SEO for quite about 3 years now. In the last year or so (or whenever it was Google released the toolbar) people started REALLY stressing over their site's Page Rank (as evidenced by this forum in particular).

I don't quite get it, I guess.

I have many sites that I do SEO for right now that get #1 rank for their desired keywords, and have less PageRank than results #'s 2-10 for the same keywords.

I also have sites with higher PageRank than competing websites, that rank lower for their desired keywords.

To me, what this all means is that PR means absolutley nothing.

Can anyone please explain to me WHY I should care about my PageRank at all? I really want to understand.
Thanks in advance for your enlightening comments!

[bobriggs]

Can anyone please explain to me WHY I should care about my PageRank at all?

There are a lot of factors, namely relevancy, that make up a SERP. In this respect, you are correct.

Let's take it to another extreme. You have a PR8 site with keyword widget, and the PR1 site has a keyword tigdiw. Obviously the PR1 site will beat yours.

OTOH, if you are competing against another widget site, you won't want to be up against a PR9.

[deejay]

Because all other things being equal, PR will make the difference in your SERP placement.

Take two pages exactly the same - same title, same headings, same content, same keyword density, same internal site linking structure - only make one a PR7 and the other a PR4. The PR7 will come up higher in the SERP.

Or take two pages not identical in look, but identical in how they score in Google's calculations for a keyword- say the simplified scoring looks like:

7/10 for page title
7/10 for headings
6/10 for content
6/10 for internal site links
8/10 for content

Both sites have 34 out of a possible 50 points. Add in PR, and Site 1 with a PR of 7/10 is going to come up higher with a total of 41/60. Site 2 with a PR of 4 will place lower with a score of 38/60.

Calculate that over a couple hundred thousand sites and there could be quite a few placings between site 1 and site 2. And that's without weighting any of the factors.

Unfortunately PR seems to be weighted so heavily that it is hard to ignore.

I think you can see this in shifts in the algo from update to update too. I would bet that the current new update weights PR more heavily than the last update did, based on shifts in SERPS in my keywords. A month ago people were commenting on how the then-new update seemed to have lowered the weighting of PR as a factor.

I'm not one for panicing over PR. I don't particularly like it as a ranking system, but I don't think you can ignore it for what it is - a significant factor.

[nancyb]

Relevency is, of course, king. But if you don't have any links to your site (or google has penalized you and doesn't recognize your back links) then you will know why people are stressed about it. Won't matter if you are optimized well because you won't be able to find the site in the first 5 or more pages for any competetive keyword or search phrase.

[JayC]

PageRank may not be the most important element in obtaining good rankings, but it is important. For one thing, a strong PR provides a foundation to rank well on any keyword phrase, while most other elements that one might work on will help in only one area.

But still, much of the obsession with PR comes because there's that handy graphic on the toolbar. If instead of PageRank the Google engineers had decided to put, say, a measure of how close the keyword density of the most commonly-used term on your page came to their ideal, or a measure of how effectively you were using <h1> tags, or whatever... we'd be talking about that more than we would be talking about PageRank!

[rfgdxm1]

I've noticed that the Google algo is such that PageRank is VERY important if you need to optimize for search terms that are highly competitive. If you happen to have a site on a topic where there isn't many other sites about, it may be quite possible to get high Google SERPs for the likely search terms people use with a low PageRank. However, if you have a website that sells widgets, and there are a LOT of sites out there where people are selling widgets, coming up high for "widget sales" may be very difficult unless you have a high PageRank.

[steveb]

the more specific a query, the less pagerank matters. In some highly competetive areas, where everybody *appears* equally relevant, pagerank is everything.

[ciml]

I agree with all the comments so far, but there is another aspect.

Having a decent PageRank score does not give a great boost by itself. In my opinion, it plays a greater role in defining how much of a boost that page can give to other pages.

[TWhalen]

Thank you all for your answers to my question.
I think SteveB spelled it out best for me, short and sweet:

"the more specific a query, the less pagerank matters. In some highly competetive areas, where everybody *appears* equally relevant, pagerank is everything."

This definition makes sense to me. I just haven't yet encountered this situation, so PageRank still seems a non-factor to me.

For now... :)

[Allergic]

I totally agree with you TWhalen. For me the Pagerank is only good if you look in the directory part of Google. And having two sites with identical data is almost impossible. The domain name, the directory structure and the filename will always be different.
Choosing the best keywords is THE first thing. I recently optimized a site of children toys and dolls. After making some research on the word "dolls" with tools like Overture and Wordtracker I realised the words "Cartoon dolls" was search 50% more than the word "dolls" alone !