Is Pagerank overrated? Yes it is!
Is Pagerank overrated?
The quick answer is yes. Pagerank is only a statistic that says you rank high on Google’s search engine algorithm.
Instead of Pagerank, you should really focus on web traffic.
Why?
Web traffic is what makes you money, not pagerank. Pagerank can be bought using text links and whatnot to artificially boost your PR high but boosting your PR won’t give you the web traffic. Getting more web traffic gives you more web traffic.
Can you prove that?
Yes, I can prove it. There’s websites out there with PR6 or PR7, yet their web traffic is so little, it won’t even show up on Alexa. I have blogs that have no Pagerank, yet they get decent amount of traffic. (Around 1,000 uniques)
Through experience of running many niche blogs (some horribly failed and some decent), I have found that Pagerank only serves a purpose of ranking your site when you have “competition”. That is, let’s say you are trying to show up #1 on Google organic results for “baseball caps”. Now, if your site has a higher PR than others, you are more likely to show up first for “baseball caps”. But that doesn’t mean you will get lots of traffic, especially if no one searches “baseball caps”.
Instead, what you need to do is sought out blue oceans of SEO, those keywords that either still have no meaning to the Google search engine, or it’s still very uncompetitive.
For example, my tech blog Zedomax.com is PR4 but gets more traffic than a lot of PR5 blogs. Pagerank is overrated.
Pagerank can be cheated, web traffic cannot. Web traffic is only based on your content and how that content fares among your competition, or other content that’s similar to that. Of course, PR has everything to do with how well that ranks on Google but if you have a LOT of content, you will still get decent traffic even if your site shows up on the 2nd page.
So what am I saying?
You need to focus on web traffic. If you have a LOT of great content, people will naturally link to you and you will get the SEO too as a bonus. It should always be a lot of content, then SEO, not the other way around.
A lot of SEO specialists focus on making a static Web 1.0 site then SEO marketing the crap out of it, only to end up with high Pagerank but no real web traffic.
Of course, if you can get some A-list blogs to link to you somehow, that’s going to be great for web traffic and SEO but remember this, it’s simply not respectable to buy or sell links. Buying or selling links for artificial Pagerank growth is really a dirty practice in my mind. You should “earn” your right to be on the first page of Google through the old, hard way of writing good content and letting people link to it if they like it.
Well, that’s my 2 cents on SEO today, do I feel more honorable now?
Yes, your honesty will pay off in the long run but cheating will only hurt you in the end.
It’s just like school, people who know the “stuff” will outlast the people who cheat during tests.
But if you must insist on selling and buying links, go ahead, just don’t get caught. 
Next post, I will go over some smart SEO practices for blog titles, which a LOT of people overlook.
Tags: alexa, baseball caps, blog, bonus, decent traffic, google, google search engine, money, niche, oceans, pr6, pr7, search engine algorithm, statistic, web traffic, whatnot
Loading ...
November 14th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Yes. I do agree that we should be concentrating on web traffic than the Page rank. Page rank has no significant effect on website except that it looks good having it.
November 21st, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I don’t think there is a correlation between page rank and traffic. It’s more a way google ranks pages in terms or relevant incoming links.
November 22nd, 2008 at 1:56 am
Yes, you are right, traffic is not correlated with page rank but in a way it is. If you pagerank is higher, the better chance of your site getting traffic from google than those sites with less.
Of course, I understand where you are coming from though, thanks for visitin’ the blog.