Is Google Page Rank Still Relevant?

What is Google Page Rank and how does it affect me you ask. Google Page Rank is a website score that represents how important a websites relevance is in the category of business they represent. Google gets this score from measuring the amount of quality links pointing to your site from other websites with the same relevance.

If you have a link to your website from another website with a Google Page Rank of 5 and is relevant to the subject matter your company represents, then Google sees that as a quality link. If you can get your link on a homepage of a high ranking website that is relevant to yours, then you will get a higher score than putting it on a sub page of the site which will usually get a lower Page Rank.

Google usually makes a major Page Rank update every three to four months. Its servers around the globe have to compare there information and the Page Rank is not complete until all of Googles servers have been updated with the new Page Rank scores.

The Page Rank is measured from 1 to ten one being the lowest score and ten being the highest you can have. New sites and sites that have not had any search engine optimization applied to them will have a score of 0. If you use Mozilla Firefox for browsing you can install a new add called SEO Quake. This tool will allow you to see how many links you have in Google and Yahoo.

It will show you the sites page rank and when the site was registered. You can do a search in Google for new music for example. The free results will show up with all the link info and page rank score below the text listing. You can compare all the sites for yourself and can make a partial determination that the Google Page Rank is still a large factor is determining your placement for targeted keywords in the free listings.

I currently manage the SEO campaigns for 27 successful websites and have noticed my Google placement on all staying consistent in their positions as Yahoo and MSN positions continue to rise. Google has made several updates on my back link quality and count on each site but I see little movement in the sites placement since April when the last PR update was performed. The page rank is more than just a number and if it is that irrelevant than Google has not made many other major updates on its server since April either.

Just remember, optimize your site for your customers first and for the search engines second. You can get plenty of traffic using the wrong keywords but visitors will see your site is not what they were looking for when they get there. A few quality back links are more relevant than a bunch of non relevant back links. Use common sense and consider what your customers are looking for and what they expect to see when they get to your website.