PR Not Important Anymore, Yeah Right!!

Posted in SEO

I used to post a lot to a newsgroup called alt.internet.search-engines which tends to concentrate on search engine optimization, you can view the NG through Googlegroups at alt.internet.search-engines. But recently the majority of regular posters SEO understanding has degraded significantly, posters like Big Bill (BB who is the most prolific poster) in particular brings that groups usefulness to a very low level, so my posts are now far and few between. It’s a shame as it used to be an interesting newsgroup to participate in.

Many of the current regulars believe PageRank (PR) is no longer important to Google SERPs. Take a read about my views on PageRank at PageRank Explained. Google started it’s search engine based on PageRank, but over the years they have had to alter their search algorithm to combat those who try to gain higher rankings through understanding how the algorithm works and adapting a websites code etc… to meet those requirements.

For example a couple of years back you could create a new site with 1,000 optimized pages (and optimizing a page isn’t rocket science), give it enough links (from any source almost) to get the home page to PR5 and within a few months you were practically guaranteed a fair chunk of targeted traffic. Now it takes at least 9 months and more likely 12 months to see any significant traffic. It’s been called the Sandbox Effect and has really made organic SEO much harder.

This change does not mean Google no longer uses PR/links as part of it’s ranking process, just it’s changed how it’s does things to make an SEOs task much harder.

My take on this is Google used to take the value of a link and basically immediately pass that link benefit in full to the recipient page. Now (2005 onwards) there’s a significant delay between adding a link and seeing it’s benefit fully. So when a page gains a new link it won’t see it’s full effect for maybe 6 months or more (I estimate it’s between 9 and 12 months).

Since a lot of people have little patience and expect what they do today to show rewards quickly this has led them to believe PR is no longer important, since the PR of the page goes up within 3-4 months, but rankings doesn’t move for 6+ months (12+ months in some cases).

As a webmaster this means you must obtain long term links no short term links like you see with the blackhat technique of link spamming where a comment spammed link from a blog has a relatively short life on a high PR page.

To the webmaster building a real, substantial business around Google traffic expect a minimum year delay, it will be slow going with a lot of work, but you’ll get there eventually and when you do you will most likely stay there for years to come.

This is what businesses should want (long term stability) and what Google wants (sites that have earned their traffic), no fly by night web sites that rank well for a couple of months, get banned and so are deleted only to be replaced with a similar site that’s banned a few months later.

PR is also important for other reasons, which I’ll explain another time.

Also read more about PR at PageRank Explained and Leaking PageRank/PR.