What is the value of knowing your PageRank?

[peterinwa]

I know from my site statistics that searching for "abc," a very popular search word, I come up #1 on the Google results page.

I also know that most people find my site searching for "abc def" for which I come up #2. Further, when after a year at #2 I slipped to #3, I changed one word in my META tag description and moved back to #2.

What is the value of knowing that my Google PageRank is 5?

Thanks, Peter

[Marcia]

Probably not much value in your case, but if backlinks from your own site were to stop showing up you'd then want to know what your PR is to help explain it. And if you saw a drop in rankings it would help to know if you'd gone down in PR and lost some inbound links.

[peterinwa]

Thanks Marcia, but what do you mean by backlinks from my own site?

[sdani]

If you know that your page rank is 5, then you *probably* have a good chance that your site can be deep crawled upto 3-4 levels deep.
I personal think that this is important to know.

[Stefan]

but what do you mean by backlinks from my own site?

Your internal navigation, the links that connect your site, will show up as backlinks in G for the various pages if they are 4 or above, (mostly, usually, not necessarily).

Most sites have a link on every page to the "home" page, index.htm, default.htm etc.

If you're not the sort that regularly looks to see if your inner pages are still listed, then seeing your own backlinks to your home page disappearing indicates that there might be a problem, i.e. you're losing pages from G, or the internal pages are losing PR, (gone below PR4). In that case, you might want to try to figure out why.

[tbear]

Back links generally refers to other sites that link to you, thus giving your site some 'importance' to it's given theme.
How the sites link to you is also of some importance (link text, pr of linking pages, etc).
Hope that helps.
Of course, pr on it's own has limited importance!

[layklynn]

My site suddenly dropped from 6 to 4 in January, and I fell off the map for most of my key words in Google.

(1) What happened in January?

(2) What is the significance of a drop from 6 to 4? (And how can I get it back up!)

Thanks.

[mars9820]

Hi,

When your page is PR4 you most likely get a hit on the index page once a day and a deepcrawl about once a month.

When your PR is 5 or higher you seem to get a daily crawl on more pages.

Actually out of experience every page that is PR5 and higher gets crawled daily if you keep updating parts of your page.

Hope this will help you.

[layklynn]

mars: I was definitely getting hammered by the googlebot late last year, and now it hardly calls.

[mars9820]

well time to work on your backlinks in that case :)

[Marcia]

Getting back to Peter's original question:

What is the value of knowing that my Google PageRank is 5?

If you know your PR is 5, if rankings were to drop noticeably and PR has dropped to 4 with some loss of backlinks, you'd know that you needed to get more links. Particularly since interior site pages probably rank for some keywords and if the homepage PR drops so will the rest of the site pages. So it's a fairly decent barometer in that respect.

[tedster]

Since PR appplies to specific pages and is not "site-wide", I also find it useful to see which pages on a site have the highest PR.

Then when I want a new page to rank well on more a competitive search term, I can link to it from pages that I already know have higher PR, instead of pages that may be nearly invisible on the web map of my site and do the target page little good.

[mars9820]

Tedster.

There are some websites out there that use the API and display results together with PR next to them.

In that case you can do a site search and you will see the PR of all pages.

If you want the URL...sticky me.

[Mozart]

Maybe Peter wanted to know something different...? Maybe he asked "If I am ranking very well anyway, why should or shouldn't I care about PR?".

Peter, if this is what you are wondering about, so do many of us... PR used to be an indicator of the potential of a given page (better actually site, as the PR indicated by the googlebar is for any page other than the homepage only an estimate) to rank very high in the results. These days it looks like PR is not so important anymore and other factors in the Google algo are more dominant, such as the link text of inbound links.

If you are ranking very well you are in a lucky position. You could perhaps with a few more well chosen inbound links or other optimizations rank as number one. But maybe you are one of the saner people who don't need that and if that's the case I applaude you!

Mozart

[Mozart]

tedster:

I am curious, how would you find out the PR of an individual page within your site? Using the googlebar as far as I know does not help, as any page other than the homepage of your site only gets estimated, roughly on the formula that for any subdirectory away from root you get one PR point deducted.

And that can easily be shown as being incorrect, as you could place a page into five levels of subs and link from the homepage and it would show a huge difference in PR which it should not according to the official PageRank calculations.

However, I heard that an inbound link to any given page results in the "true" PR for that page being displayed. Is this correct? Anyone having experience with that?

Mozart

[mars9820]

Mozart,

Your story was true about 1 year ago. Not anymore.

Every page has it's true PR as far as I can see.

The PR is calculated based on incoming links on a given page. This can be internal links or external links (or both of course).