SEO Glossary Terms: PageRank

PageRank is Google's measurement of the number and quality of links a particular web page has. Most often, the term PageRank is used to describe the Google Toolbar PageRank which is a graphical, numerical representation of a page's link profile at any given time. A lot of novice SEO campaign managers and website owners have a tendency to place far too much stock in the PR of a page subsequently paying less heed to more important factors like ranking, traffic, and conversion rates.

In reality, there are a number of reasons why the PageRank of a page is less important than it is widely considered. For a start, it is updated so infrequently that you could be looking at a figure that is a week, a month, three months, or even six months out of date; a long period of time in the world of SEO and it certainly makes a poor benchmark and measurable data figure.

Google PageRank does not consider relevance or other factors that will help determine the ranking of a web page. Without these factors the PageRank has no correlation to the ranking of your pages and it is not uncommon to see pages with a PageRank of 2 beating pages with a PageRank of 7 or 8 – this is largely because of the factor of relevance.

Finally, there is no connection between PageRank and traffic levels, which should be the most important consideration when measuring SEO effectiveness. Rankings will effect your traffic figures and both of these factors are worth concentrating on considerably more than the PageRank of a page.