Does PR even matter anymore?

PO-0 site gives good results?

[Turbosho]

Hi all,
I have a 1.5 month old site with 1 backlink that is displaying many results on the front page of google.. It is a 1 page site and has a PR of 0. Does PR matter at all anymore?
Turb osho

[newwebster]

I think Google has shut PR ranking and some filtering off while they work through the new infrastructure. I see evidence of this in my niche.

[lammert]

I have a 1.5 month old site

Turbosho, first of all welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Your answer is inside your post. Google updates the pagerank in the toolbar only every three months. The last update was somewhere in october 2005. You should see a jump in toolbar PR in the comming weeks. The same for the backlinks. Only a small portion of the known backlinks are shown by Google.

What you see is not what you get with this search engine...

[ulysee]

Heck, links don't even matter anymore for alot of search terms I see.

[Smashing Young Man]

I believe the biggest benefit to good PR is that it makes potential link partners and possibly some ad networks look more favorably upon your site.

[annej]

I think it's still considered and the PR of pages that link to you are important. But I do think many other factors have diluted the impact of PR.

[randle]

The only real benefit we see out of higher PR, is more frequency on the crawl, and fresher cache dates. It helps when you make changes to your site to see them appear in just a few days as opposed to 4 weeks. As far as ranking, tough to say, but there doesn’t appear to be much relationship there.

[moftary]

My experience shows that a high pagerank results in fast, and more importantly, deep crawling. Also it worth mentioning that a PR is on-the-fly now, a page might have toolbar PR0 while its actual pagerank is much higher, and visa versa.

[Turbosho]

So do you think that the link exchanges still work at all for G? I have participated in some of those sites that facilitate link exchanges in the past and it has worked well on some and just ok on others. Didn't know if it's even worth bothering anymore. I know you get almost 0 traffic from those link pages so their other value is worthless.

[annej]

I think everything is so uncertain right now. Google seems to be in the process of some big changes.

I'm going to concentrate on adding content improving the readability of my old content. Shorter paragraphs, good lead in at the top of the article. Stuff like that will be helpful no matter what.

Getting links from quality sites is always good but it's harder now then ever. They have been bombarded by so many requests.

If a handy link exchange happens by that's great I'm not going to waste time on a link exchange campaign.

[Komodo_Tale]

Turboso,

Read my (long-winded) post at
[webmasterworld.com...]

Yes, PageRank does matter, or more specifically, the factors/variables that are used to create PageRank. What throws everyone off is that the PageRank factors are combined with context variables to generate the SERPS.

I suspect that the formula for PageRank itself has changed very little nor will it change much in the future. It appears fairly straight forward–links based and logarithmic–therefore remains accurate and valid as the size of the World Wide Web grows and fluctuates.

What seems to keep changing are the contextual variables, of which there are two types: on-site and off-site. On-site variables include keyword and key phrase frequency, frequency of related words, natural variation in words, amount of content and how well your website pages relate to each other. You will find lots of information about on-site variables throughout these forums.

Off-site contextual variables are used to determine how closely related or relevant the content of sites that link to your site are to the content on your site. For example, you could have a PageRank 7, but if all the sites that link to your website are about religion and your site is about screwdrivers, the search engines could discredit your site.

In my opinion, it is with the contextual factors that search engines are evolving the most, with the off-site factors being the newest and most rapidly developing.

Here is something to keep in mind when you see changes in the SERPS. The search engines are constantly experimenting and developing their mathematical algorithms (Google seems to be the most public about this). As with any evolutionary process, sometimes things do not work in the real world the way they do in the lab (The map is not the territory) and bad things occasionally happen to good websites. The good news is that the search engines are aware of this and will undo or tweak-out unexpected negative consequences.

Here is what you do not hear too often on the boards. The search engines (Especially Google) have always told webmasters how to develop their websites and how to exchange links. No matter how far back you go they have urged relevance both on-site and off-site. Unfortunately, not everyone followed this advice, opting for what was easier and seemingly most effective during the time period they were engaged in those activities. Now, as the search engine algorithms become more advanced, the sins of the past are catching-up with some webmasters. This is especially true on SEO Forums because it has been so easy for participants to exchange links or uncover the newest tricks. So when you see several webmasters who participate in the SEO forums bemoan the latest search engine results, you need to wonder if there is a good reason for them to have dropped.

Believe it or not, what you have to accomplish as a webmaster to generate good rankings has not changed much over the years. Brett Tabke's 26 Steps to 15K a Day is still Google Guy endorsed.
[searchengineworld.com...]
If you have not read it, you need to.

And of course, in everything you do as a webmaster, ask yourself, "Will this increase or dilute relevancy?" If you are honest in this test and industrious in your efforts you will do just fine.

Good Luck Turboso,

The Komodo Tale

[annej]

Thanks for the clear and informative post Komodo.

It really help one see the whole picture.