Dissecting the value of PageRank

PageRank has been the topic of many a spirited debate amongst the SEO community-at-large for a long time now. Some professionals will tell you that PR is completely inconsequential to search rankings, while others will swear upon the lives of their children that PR is the driving force behind the success of their sites.

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Andy Steggles of SitePR Tracker talks with Mike McDonald of WebProNews at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago about the true value of PageRank, and what it should and shouldn’t mean for your site.

Andy talks about his past experiences with the PageRank feature and the discrepancies that have occurred in Google Webmaster Tools in regards to finding the highest PR value page on his site. Bearing this in mind, he stresses that PageRank in and of itself is not a tool for boosting search engine rankings. It is, however, a good barometer to gauge how Google perceives the “quality�? of your pages, an issue that is becoming increasingly important as Google tweaks its algorithm for calculating quality score, and consequently adjusting minimum bid values based on the findings.

One of the major PageRank killers is duplicate content. If your site’s content is mirrored in a good number of other online sources, your PR will drop faster than Kevin Federline’s net worth. Therefore, it is vital that webmasters pay as much attention to the originality of their content as possible. If you have other users that submit content to your site, encourage them to put their own spin on things instead of simply scraping text from one site and pasting it on yours.

Above all, however, don’t invest the majority of your time obsessing over PageRank as the end-all, be-all of tools for achieving high search rankings. PR is only an indicator of quality, and therefore is just one cog in the wheel that drives the machine of search engine optimization.

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