Is Google’s Page Rank An Important Factor When Deciding Link Value?

Google Page Rank in relation to SEO has been around for many years and it is still used by many internet marketers as one of the main metrics for a links value. In many respects using Page Rank as a core metric to determine a links value is a mistake for many reasons, one being the fact that Google updates the Page Rank values for web pages very intermittently, so there is no way of knowing the accurate value or Page Rank of that page at anytime.

Page Rank however is not a useless metric as some SEO people believe and there is some definite value to having a higher Page Rank value for a web page however it is important that you look at Page Rank as just one factor out of many factors when determining link value.

Linking links page rank

Linking links page rank

There are a lot of rumours and myths surrounding Page Rank in modern SEO and we will have a look at some of these and try to set some misinterpretations straight.

Page Rank Toolbar

There are many tools on the web that show a websites Page Rank number which is ranked between 0 and 10, and this number is what many people use to measure a web pages value; however it is not updated consistently. For example we saw an update on toolbar Page Rank a few months back, however before this update we had not seen an update for 11 months and as a result of this it means that using this toolbar Page Rank as a core metric is very inaccurate.

Real Page Rank

Google is constantly updating its Page Rank calculations for websites on a daily basis; however they may not necessarily be updating the toolbar Page Rank people use to measure.




One of the key aspects Google uses Page Rank for is to calculate how often they should crawl a certain website or web page and this is normally down to the number of a links a site has and the amount of new fresh content it regularly publishes. So in many respects high Page Rank means that the website or more specifically web page will just get crawled more than a site or page with low Page Rank.

It is very important that SEO and internet marketers recognize the difference between toolbar Page Rank and real Page Rank because they are very different and can no way be used to measure the value of a page accurately.

High Page Rank Equals High Value Link?

For many SEO professionals this is a common misconception and is not a valid way to value a links worth as we established above the tool bar Page Rank is not an accurate metric. What you want to be looking at are things Page Rank does not take into account such as domain worth, relevancy, rankability, which are all very important metrics when considering a links value for a website.

So for example if your website is a football retail website, then you might be selling football shirts and football kits such as the Chelsea shirt, Manchester United shirt or full Chelsea kit and would be wanting to get links from football related websites and football blogs as much as possible. Of course you might use the Page Rank of a football blog to give you an idea of the value of the site but then you need to look deeper into how the site ranks and the kind of inbound links it has as well.

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