So, Google Page Rank has been “Updated” (Even though Google Webspam Boss Man, Matt Cutts implied it wouldn’t happen in 2013.)
Should you be excited? Should you care? Not in the slightest.
In my opinion all Page Rank has done is give birth to a breed of SEOs that suffer from what I call “Page Rank Obsession Disorder”, Or PROD for short.
I really don’t understand why Google claim on the one hand that SEO’s should create websites that give visitors a great experience (and also penalise sites that don’t) and then give the world an absolute meaningless and antiquated metric which simply results in SEO’s and webmasters that know no better to hinge all their hopes on making a green bar fill up rather than giving visitors what they want.
The irony is, if PROD sufferers spent time obsessing about their customers instead, they wouldn’t need to desperately watch that bloody green bar fill up once per year to give them confirmation that their SEO is a success, they’d see it on their bottom line!
I’ll give you an example:
I have a client that has had a Page Rank drop from 5 to 4. This probably happened months ago but as the Page Rank was only publicly updated the other day we’ve only just found out about it.
Did the client lose business? No, Their revenue is up by 90% year on year.
Did they lose organic traffic? No, they’re up by about 40% year on year. The only thing that changed is that green bar got a little shorter and guess what, they don’t care and I don’t care either. You see, fortunately, we don’t suffer from PROD and that allows us to put 100% of our attention into making sure the website has great content, is easy to use and converts well. My client and I judge progress on what really matters – conversions. Incidentally this website ranks better than it ever has done too.
THIS is the bottom line, not Page Rank:
Some facts about Page Rank:
Page Rank is a visual indicator of how Google “trusts” your website. It comes from links to your website (we all know what happens to websites that go out and create loads of unnatural links right?).
Google as often implied that Page Rank will go away (at least visually anyway)
It’s actually updated daily but the Page Rank Toolbar is only updated periodically (this is the first one in 10 months)
Most websites saw a drop in Page Rank this time around
