Google Pagerank Doesn't Matter. It's Dead

By Author: Larry Tang
Total Articles: 512
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If your PageRank has dropped, it's not a sign that you are going to start dropping in search engine results. You're already screwed! Google PageRank is dead.

If you rely on your PageRank to determine whether you are doing a good job of internet marketing, you are basically looking at how you were doing 3-6 months ago (it's in the rear view mirror).

To get a better idea of how PageRank does not matter, you can simply install an Alexa Ranking checker and have the PageRank feature installed; I use ‘SearchStatus 1.21', a great Firefox extension that has both Alexa and Google. After installing it, the next timeyou notice a site with a good page rank, but their Alexa rank is not in the top 200,000, then that means they don't even have 50 visitors a day coming to the site. So having a high PageRank doesn't guarantee you visitors. However, Content does!

I've noticed that when I create a site to get more overall visitors, more "Google visitors" seem to come, as well as "Yahoo visitors", and other search engine visitors. But when I concentrate on getting more "Google" visitors, I get simple that, more ...
... "Google visitors".

In recent months Google has gone as far as denying access to PageRank status from random datacenters, and sometimes returning bogus results.

There is an interesting tool at www.iwebtool.com called "PageRank Checker."It used to be that if you do a query there (PageRank Checker) you would get the results of the PageRank from different Google datacenters. It was great to see if for example your have a PageRank of 4 on the toolbar, and you did a query and saw that most of the datacenters are showing a solid 4 across the board then you are at the solid 4. But if you saw some PageRank 5s in the output, it meant that you are on the verge of moving up to PageRank 5. At this point you should go full force with increasing your backlinks, getting more unique content on the site, at an increasing rate. Over the coming weeks you would see more and more datacenters increasing your rank, and then beautifully one sunny Saturday morning you wake up, and see the PageRank 5.

Another scenario is that you can also see your site slipping to PageRank 3, or even 2. This means Google sees your content as being worth less. This should prompt you to immediately act to upgrade the quality and freshness of your content.

That was then. After October 2007, if you did the same query you would get ridiculous results; some datacenters were down, and mysteriously you might have a couple of PageRank 7's in certain datacenters, while your site is simply PageRank 3. Something fishy was going on, so I researched the problem and found this:

Excerpt from Google PageRank Nuke: (We DO NOT ENDORSE THIS WEBSITE!)

"Four months from now Google will come out and say: We had told endless times before the green bar was not to take into account, but no one (Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews) seems to listen, so we had to take stronger measures. It was the only way we find to make people take us serious."

If you go to the site, you will read a short paragraph explaining that, Google is pretty much playing around with the PageRank now. Don't worry, they still use PageRank, and still displays it. But for the people that are constantly using tools to check the ranking at different datacenter's, it is almost point less.

So how do you check whether you are doing good or bad on Google? My answer is Google doesn't matter. That's right you heard me. Google doesn't make you money visitors do! Google doesn't read your content, visitors do. Google doesn't buy your products, visitors do. It's the visitors that matter. If you create good content, then people will come to your site. Webmasters will link to your site. Some visitors will "Digg It! Some will "StumbleUpon It!" And others will simply bookmark it. This in effect creates backlinks to your great content. You will have more and more visitors to your site, and if you are selling a product, your sales will increase. Then one day "The Google" will come along and see all these great content, increasing backlinks , and start sending you tons of traffic. Yahoo will follow suit, and the other smaller search engines will too.

A rule of thumb I use when I create a marketing campaign is to have 50% or less of my site overall traffic coming from search engines. Now this is an uphill and formidable task if you think about it. Since that means if I see my overall search engine traffic increasing to over 40% to 50%, I have to create a link building campaign, to get more backlinks, and increase traffic from other sources. It an uphill battle, since when I create more backlinks, the search engines will see this and send more, and more, and tons more of traffic.

The reason I use this approach of 50% or less, is that if I had a site which had 80% of its traffic coming from Google, and "The Google" updates itself and causes the site to drop because I don't have enough backlinks, or simply the competition has more than me, my overall traffic can be harmed by up to 80%. Can any business afford to have their customers drop up to almost 80%? No business that I have ever been associated with.

In my setup, I am winning either way, and am increasing my backlinks, which is guaranteeing me that if The Google updates itself, it will not result in a huge drop; even if it does, losing 20% or less is better than losing up to 80%. It's like hedging your bets, but in this case, you gain either way by, increasing backlinks, the search engines send more traffic.

In the end you get more visitors, more sales and profits.

I have never seen a site with great content that didn't have visitors, but I have seen several sites will high PageRank and no visitors. Your internet marketing campaigns should concentrate on getting more visitors, and getting them great content, not concentrating on the PageRank.