Google Page Rank Dead?
-
Does PR still work?
I have sites that have PR3 and get almost no traffic and sites that are PR1 and get thousands of uniques per month.
My PR on my main sites haven't moved for about 7 years, even though we've grown significantly.
I know lots of you are going to jump in with get the MOZ toolbar, which I already have done, and I agree, it's great ...
But can anyone tell me about what's going on with Google PR?
Is it still active? Or has Google abandoned? I noticed that the Google toolbar is not even available for Google Chrome. That should say something ...
- If you like this question, do me a favor, and give me a THUMBS UP!
-
While we don't know the exact math, I think the existence of two PR measures (internal and Toolbar) is pretty much established fact at this point. TBPR is a simplification of a much more continuous PR scale and is almost definitely non-linear. The difference between TBPR 6 vs. 7 is MUCH greater than the difference between TBPR 1 vs. 2, for example.
-
People polarize quickly on this one, but I think Charles' middle ground is probably closest to the truth - PR is still a part of the algorithm and is a raw measure of link popularity. The trick is that:
- It's just one ranking factor of 100s
- Toolbar PR approximates Google's internal PR
- Toolbar PR could be 1-3+ months out of date
Keep in mind that TBPR is probably on a logarithmic scale, so the distance between low TBPR's is much less than the distance between high TBPRs. In other words, the difference in "real" PR between TBPR 1 and 2 is MUCH smaller than the difference between 6 and 7.
-
I agree with others. It's not dead (I know there's been recent updates), but it's not necessarily an important factor. It's simply an indicator that Google releases.
-
PageRank don't seems to be dead. PageRank is kind of reputation of a page in Google's eye which essentially don't mean that highest PR sites ranks in top positions of SERPs. Ranks in SERPs are searched query specific while PageRank seems more generic weight of page in google's eye.
It is assumed (as well as said by google) that PageRank is only based on backlinks. But I have got PR3 and even PR4 for websites which don't have any link, but have good number of pages having quality content.
In my opinion, PageRank is overall weight of page in Google's eye. And more importantly... two pages having same PR does not mean their value is same of Google. I think internally Google score webpages from 1 to 1,000.000 (or something big), and show the rounded figure in form of PR1 to PR10.
PageRank is the quickest way to guess the worth of any page.
-
It's pretty much a useless metric these days - and remember that there might be two seperate 'Page Ranks' - the one on the toolbar and the internal one that Google has in it's vault
-
I've seen changes within the last 6 months to websites PR so I believe it's not dead. It gets updated randomly Google doesn't update it publicly very often because they don't want SEO people to focus on this number.
If you want more info on PR what this video...http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday
Here's a quote from the Video explaining PR:
"PageRank is useful as a raw indication of link popularity. Meaning that, PageRank doesn't take into account anchor text. It doesn't take into account whether the sites are related to each other. It doesn't take into account whether some of the sites maybe have been flagged for spam. It doesn't take into account whether the page is relevant to the actual search query"
-
I'm interested in hearing the latest word on that... I don't believe it's "dead" as in "no longer updated, no longer based in anything meaningful" but it seems like many SEO's believe that its not relevant - but why that is, I'm not sure so I'm wondering if someone can give us the quick rundown.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to replace an already ranked page with a better, more optimised one?
Hello peeps! I need your collective wisdom to help me deal with something. We manage a website that is doing quite well in its niche, however we have the following problem: Our section landing pages are well established and they rank for a wide range of search terms, including some with a transactional focus. It is obvious that these pages do not cater for users with transactional intent. Our competitors are targeting those transactional keywords with a completely different type of pages, and are winning across the board (annoying but understandable). We have now created a number of pages, which are very similar to the ones that our competitors are using and with an even better on-page SEO score ... WIN! ...well, not so much! Our old section pages are still ranking for the transactional search terms and our new pages are getting very little traction and are having a really slow start. 1. I suspect there is some sort of page cannibalisation going on. How would you address that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yordan.Vasilev
2. Is there a tried and tested way of telling search engines to rank your new page because it meets the search intent in a better way? Please note that we cannot just redirect the old page to the new one - there are structural and commercial reasons for keeping the old page as it is.
3. Is there anything else that I am missing? Your help is much appreciated.
Thanks
Yordan0 -
Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP
I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Can someone help me understand why this page is ranking so well?
Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives. The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam. The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO. Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Google crawled my rich snippet pages and then excluded them
Hi guysWe have added schema.org mark up a few months ago and it all looked well and showed up then suddenly last month all the crawled pages disappeared from Webmaster tools Structured data (see the screenshot attached). This happened to another site of mine and I cannot figure out what causes it. Nothing has been changed on the pages and you can see by yourself in the HTML code. Any ideas to why this might happened this way?wenR89I.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Walltopia0 -
Google Analytics: how to filter out pages with low bounce rate?
Hello here, I am trying to find out how I can filter out pages in Google Analytics according to their bounce rate. The way I am doing now is the following: 1. I am working inside the Content > Site Content > Landing Pages report 2. Once there, I click the "advanced" link on the right of the filter field. 3. Once there, I define to "include" "Bounce Rate" "Greater than" "0.50" which should show me which pages have a bounce rate higher of 0.50%.... instead I get the following warning on the graph: "Search constraints on metrics can not be applied to this graph" I am afraid I am using the wrong approach... any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Google.ca vs Google.com Ranking
I have a site I would like to rank high for particular keywords in the Google.ca searches and don't particularly care about the Google.com searches (it's a Canadian service). I have logged into Google Webmaster Tools and targeted Canada. Currently my site is ranking on the third page for my desired keywords on Google.com, but is on the 20th page for Google.ca. Previously this change happened quite quickly -- within 4 weeks -- but it doesn't seem to be taking here (12 weeks out and counting). My optimization seems to be fine since I'm ranking well on Google.com: not sure why it's not translating to Google.ca. Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seorm0