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Google PageRank: When Your Think PR, Think Public Relations

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google pr updates

Use common sense...

This is NOT another post about Google PageRank.

I am nauseous from all the “crystal ball” discussions on the topic going on all around the blogosphere and beyond.

However, I did learn some interesting facts pertaining to pagerank, so I will unbiasedly present them as I saw them.

You draw your own conclusions and let me know what they are in comments.

1. From the Horse’s Mouth

Here’s what one of Google employees, John Mu, had to say on the topic of PR in a recent discussion over at Google Webmasters Forum (as recent as 1/5/11)

The PageRank which we use internally is continuously updated, so even if you’re not seeing a PageRank in your Toolbar, rest assured that we’ll be treating your site accordingly regardless, and will crawl, index and rank your websites appropriately.

We do update the Toolbar PageRank regularly, even if that’s not as regularly as some of you wish. I agree that it would be nice to have it updated more frequently. Given the time since the last update, I imagine you’ll start seeing another one in the near future.

In the near future? We shall see…

2. Google Isn’t the “Master of its Domain”?

Check out what Techjaws had to say about a week ago (got to this resource via Kaiserthesage.com - thanks, Jason!)

The big buzz lately is about Google losing exclusive rights to PageRank in 2011: The fact is Stanford University actually owns the patent to “PageRank”, and Google has exclusive licensing rights to it- but only until 2011.

What??? Google didn’t come up with or owns GOOGLE PageRank?

Now you see why I had to write this post.

3. “Don’t Worry about PR”

From Google Webmaster Help Forum - FAQ section:

Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

I Think They’ve Got a Point Here

Don’t you?

…think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

“When you think about PR, think of public relations.” - I didn’t actually come up with it; just a phrase that stuck in my mind on some blog I recently read, can’t remember what it was.

That struck cord with me.

I know a thing or two about SEO in general, but link building in particular. However, because of how quickly Traffic Generation Cafe has grown in the past 6 months, I really didn’t and still don’t have much time to work on building links or doing much of anything else other than using Scribe SEO on every post I write.

However, according to SEMrush, my blog is currently ranking for 83 keywords on Google.

It might not sound like much to some of you and a lot to others. Plus, some of these are definitely junk keywords that are not worth a pretty penny.

Some are pretty good though. For instance, I rank #5 for “high search engine ranking optimization” among some 74 Millions results. Not bad.

I think I might’ve build 10-15 quality backlinks to that page, following the principles/techniques I describe in these posts:

Marketing Takeaway

Google PR? Just something fun to talk about.

Sooooo… Focus on building a great blog. Engage your readers. Write outstanding content. Do sensible amount of SEO work - like keyword-optimized title and description tags, a few quality links.

The rest will take care of itself.

People will start mentioning your blog, linking to you, sending you traffic and recognition.

Make sure you focus on public relations and the other PR will come.

Love it or hate it? Comment to show me that you’re alive!

ana hoffman yournetbiz

36 Comments (click here to leave a comment)

  1. Anna,

    I don’t really care about PR either, i mean, i am happy if i get it, if not, it doesn’t bother me.

    In the past, i was so panic when i lost my 2 months old blog PR from 2 to 0, but then since i realize PR is only important if you want to sell advertisement or sell website..

    Other than that Pr does not mean traffic. So i focused on content only, in my opinion, make our blog valuable to readers, PR will follow automatically.

  2. Hi Ana,

    Apparently Google has just released the latest PR update so you’re probably going to see a whole lot of posts from ecstatic and disgruntled bloggers and webmasters.

    I honestly don’t know what all the fuss is about. Who the frack sees the PR anyway except the same people who are obsessed about it, and maybe some advertisers. The casual surfer wouldn’t know what it was. They certainly wouldn’t have the Google tool-bar installed on their browser.

    Honestly, it’s all crap and I reckon my blogging experience improved heaps when I stopped worrying about it.

    • My PR didn’t go anywhere and let me check… yep, I still have the pulse and the world is still functioning just fine! 🙂

      I am with you, Sire - high PR doesn’t make me a cent.

  3. Hey Ana, great post, I am still learning to create more traffic for my blog and I have been hereing about Scribe in a number of places. Is it the best plugin for SEO? I assume it is, since you use it. I know it is a paid plugin for wordpress. Are there any free plugins that can do the same things or close to what Scribe does? Thanks

    • I’ve used Scribe for a while now and have been getting a lot out of it. However, it’s a monthly subscription and I would recommend you hold off on it for now - I will do some research to see if I can find something free or at least less pricey that would do the trick.

      Ana

  4. Hey Ana,

    Thanks for the research and for sharing this information with us.

    I’m focusing on providing my readers with valuable content, working on SEO and boosting my blog traffic.

    Of course, everything will follow in due course, as you mentioned.

    Thanks for sharing this.

    All the best,
    Mavis

  5. Hi Ana,

    I had this conversation with a client once and asked him, ‘how many search engines ever bought your products?’

    Like you said, write for humans.

    Ivan

  6. Although the post content is excellent as always, Ana, you said it all with “Focus on building a great blog. Engage your readers. Write outstanding content.” It’s so easy to get caught up in all the off-site stuff that we can forget that the core ingredient to a successful blog is the content!

    Best,
    Scott

    • Indeed, Scott - I’ve been on the other side of the fence before as well: the SEO-obsessed side. Doesn’t do you any good!

      Great content in the end will bring traffic and more importantly make them stay and come back.

  7. I would be interested in post like that for sure as I do some before, watch and measure, and then some later. And I know some bloggers that focus on refining content even more than putting out new content.

    Many strategies.

  9. Ana you have put a nice resources here ..but the fact remains the same that no one knows what’s wrong this time and when Google will update page rank..
    couple of days back many of my bloggers friend reported that they have seen change in PR for their blog but it’s a minor PR update.. Every1 around is keeping their finger crossed for major update..!!

    • That’s exactly my point, Harsh - that and the fact that we should be more concerned with out readership than what Google is up to.

      Good to see you around here!

  10. And here I was thinking that SEO was all about a single number. Oh well 😛

    Perhaps I’ve been ignorant to the entire PR thing but I’ve been focused more on connecting with the right people, creating content that helps people and that they will link to, and some other strategies.

    I guess I’ll just keep doing that.

  11. I completely agree Ana.

    To me, it does make sense to me that Google would stop broadcasting this number as focusing on that one number kind of misses the point.

    PR always seemed to be about building a community and gaining exposure and status outside of that community. Just my view, of course. No one at Google called me about any of this. 😉

    So, I just concentrate on those things rather than a number that only changes every few months, or half a year, or never.

    Have a great day!

    • I started focusing on the same, Mark.

      Whether PR will be updated or not, my readers will keep me going.

      Have a great one as well.

  12. Ana - Thanks for the recap on PageRank. Given that I wrote an article on why Link Auuthority might be a better metric that PageRank back in September, I really should know better, but I still look at the little PR indicator in my Toolbar when evaluating a blog. Then, I remind myself to take a breath and focus on the fact that it is just a snapshot from March/April. But old habits are hard to break.

    • Randy:

      I feel the same way!! I know it doesn’t hold weight anymore, but I can’t help myself to look at the little green fairy dust. I just can’t look away!

      • LOL! I keep seeing a ton of “big” name bloggers saying “oh forget about PR, it doesnt matter.” Yet then they write a post about Google not updating and PR and oh what should we do. I am no fool, I know they are checking their PR just like I am and you are right Ana…at least we can be honest about it!
        I dont ever expect anything less from you though.

  13. Ya I recently read that thread about Google’s PR at the webmaster forum. Since then I stopped looking at the little bar when I load web pages. But the awareness is just now on people. I would say that still a substantial number of people believe G’s PR to be the golden scale to judge a website’s quality. That’s unfortunate.

    Jane.

  14. Amen!

    Google PageRank does not pay the bills, even if a high-ish PR allows some webmasters to charge more for ads on their website. If the PR was gone completely from today (as in: no way top check the little green bar any more), what would these webmasters do?

    I got a PR6 on a 1.5 year old blog! SO WHAT? It still only get ~100 uniques a day because the content is not updated regularly. Think quality content, quality links and everything else should follow.

  15. Ana:

    Well done my friend. But alas, would I think anything else from you?!
    I know bloggers keep saying they don’t care about PR, yet we still check that litle bar every now and again to see if there is some change…anything at all. It’s going to be a hard habit to break!
    I do think the other 200+ metrics Google uses to internally rank our pages is more of what we should realy be centering our attention on. For those that desperatley need a PR update or need some sort of validation on that front, there is always mozRank. It’s updated monthly and it offers page and domain ranking. They also correlate pretty closely with Google PR.
    Anyways, the one thing I have been trying to do this year is just write the content. Write first, tweak it up after. If I go into my content thinking, “oh my where can I put a link” my content will suffer.
    Kudos on your rankings Ana~~~ WELL deserved.

    All the best,
    Lisa

    • Write first, tweak later - that’s exactly what I had to do when I started posting on a daily basis; and I love it that way. Forget about Google, just “work” for your readers. THAT’s what will pay off at the end.

      And you are right - I would still love to see that green bar showing up over TGC. 🙂

  16. Hi Ana, awesome job with the research. I can tell a lot of work goes into your post.

    I believe it is more important to have a interesting blog than a high page rank. Although it does have some benefits. I write in several blogs across a few different niches. The blogs I have that have 2 or higher page rank usually get better rankings than my 0 to 1 page rank blogs.

    Another thing I noticed about some of my blog post from my pagerank 3 and 4 blogs is that they tend to stay ranked high longer for long tail keyword phrases.

    My lower page rank blogs, do shoot to the first page for some long tail words but they tend to also get dropped much much faster.

    Before I started really becoming a blogger, I didn’t realize the power of community. With that being said if a person focuses more on relationships and having an interesting blog that person can certainly get much more traffic than some higher page rank blogs out there.

    Thanks for sharing

    • That’s such a great point, Larry, and I can’t help to agree.

      Some bloggers do an insane amount of link building, but since they don’t focus on great content and their readership, any traffic they get from SEs ends up just bouncing at best.

      Thanks for coming back, Larry - such a pleasure to hear your intelligent opinion on the issue.