Is Google PageRank a Useful Metric?
With search engines becoming more streamlined, strategies and optimization techniques start to fall by the way side. What may have once been a useful tool or metric is now seen as geriatric. But this is the digital landscape we live in; technologies evolve and the elasticity of a specific metric or tool tells the life cycle of each resource. It is with this understanding that I pose my discussion point: Is Google PageRank a useful metric? Two time-relevant articles share opposing views to Google PageRank:
Mike Volpe (@HubSpot) sees Google PageRank as irrelevant. He writes ‘Don’t worry about PageRank. You should get found by creating great content, optimizing that content for search and promoting that content in social media and then convert these website visitors into leads and customers…’
On the other end of the spectrum is Marshall Sponder’s (@webmetricsguru) post, ‘Google PageRank really does translate into more Search Engine Traffic. In summation, he creates an argument that PageRank has some life left in it.
But as Avinash Kaushik (@avinashkaushik) explains ‘gloried data puking, hoping someone will be impressed’ seems to happen all too often with the sheer quantity of tools and metrics available. Choosing the correct one(s) to analyze and measure success can be overwhelming (esp. since so many are ignored or may be no longer useful), yet it is vital.
Is Google PageRank a useful metric within your online toolbox, or is it something which needs to be extricated from our digital vocabularies?
4 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I think it comes down to how hard you’re willing to work. Work hard at promoting the content through social media AND do the work it takes to optimize and increase page rank.
Comment by Joe Fino — July 9, 2010 @ 1:36 pm
It definitely comes down to the context of where it is being used. Outside of SEO – I don’t find it a useful metric. For example, in some cases, a PageRank of 6 may not be better than a PR of 4. This is especially true in comparing two different sites within different contextual themes. PR isn’t an accurate measure of influence or dominance on the web. It’s only reliable if you’re comparing a website with other relevant informational sites.
It the grand scheme, Google finds websites through other relevant links – the bots don’t jump between unrelated content. Hence – why relevant anchor text in links is important in link building. Google is finding smaller ‘groups’ of content and assigning index values within each one of these areas.
In the future, I could see PR becoming less relevant as the web becomes more integrated within the social layer, as well as the web being integrated into devices outside of the standard desktop computer. In other words, we won’t find information, the information will find us.
Comment by Sven Reigle — July 9, 2010 @ 4:12 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by svenreigle. svenreigle said: RT @mattbivons: New guest blog post: What's your opinion? Is Google PageRank a useful metric? http://bit.ly/aiZfHs [...]
Pingback by Tweets that mention Google PageRank, Matt Bivons, Crosby Marketing | Mid-Atlantic Digital Media Network -- Topsy.com — July 9, 2010 @ 4:33 pm
I was very pleased to find this site.I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.
Comment by Ben Relles — September 3, 2010 @ 3:47 pm