When it Comes to SEO, Don’t Worry About Your PageRank

Your website's PageRank is an important part of the SEO formula used by search engines to rank websites. A Good Toronto SEO company should know page rank as the green bar at the bottom of the screen that determines how valuable your links are and what they are worth to others.

When SEO gurus talk about page rank they are talking about the PageRank Toolbar that is on most websites you visit. This tool gives websites a rank from 1 to 10. According to Google, this is not a big factor in its SEO formula and it may be taken off the Google Toolbar.


A Lack of Updates

When you see a Google PageRank on a toolbar, you are seeing what Google thought of the website as far back as four months ago. Google does not update page rank frequently. Generally, updates are only done when data is exported. A lot of people will tell you that your PageRank can go up by 3 or more in a month but that has more to do with Google exporting data than it does with whatever SEO tricks they say they used to raise the PageRank. Other SEO novices cannot figure out why they don’t see an increase in their PageRank after working hard for months. The reason is simply that Google has not done an export of data to the toolbar recently.


Don’t Get Obsessed About Page Rank for SEO

What makes SEO new-commers focus so much on the Google PageRank when Google themselves say it really does not have that much value and they may take it off the toolbar? A lot of people just do not understand PageRank and what it really does for your website's SEO. A lot of people think that if their website can get a high PageRank from the Google toolbar then their search engine ranking will go up as well. Really, there is no correlation between your PageRank and your search engine ranking.

There is a common SEO technique that involves linking to websites that have a high PageRank.  The thought is that this will help you increase your search engine ranking and your PageRank. However, it is not that simple. PageRank is a small part of the overall formula used to determine search engine ranking.

Beginners in the SEO world worry so much about PageRank because having a high PR tells you that you are doing a good job. Many website owners know how much competition there is in the market and they feel like having a good PageRank will help them stand out from the crowd. PageRank is an easy to understand rating system because you can see how a 7 is a better ranking than a 3. Having a good PageRank seems to indicate you know what you are doing and your hard work is getting good SEO results. When you see your PageRank go up, you feel like you have something to boast about.

However, don’t put a lot of faith in these ideas. PageRank leaves out things like traffic, conversion rates, and many other important SEO factors that are measurable. When you see a website with a PageRank of 9, you may be a little bit impressed but a website with a lower PageRank that brings in more than 2,000 people a day and converts 24% of its visitors to sales is a lot more impressive.