Google PageRank is NOT SEO and was mis-used by some SEO firms that talked unsuspecting website owners into thinking it was the one off tool to measure how their website ranked in the search engines. It became an obsession with SEOers and marketers and people started to sell off links at a higher price if they came from a page with a high PageRank. Google did not take this practice lying down and started to delay the data in the tool from 6 to 9 months (or longer) after the metric was actually live for the page.

Although PageRank can and should be used as one tool to gauge the position of a page in the search engines. Due to the fact that there is so much lag from the time the actual page is ranked to the time when Google releases it to the tool. We cannot base our analytics on it nor should we! PageRank is only one factor in ranking a page, it is not the sole factor to consider.

As a web developer it is my job to change this taboo with my clients that their PageRank is not the only metric that needs to be used to determin how there websites pages are ranking in the search results. Otto from The Search Agents wrote a great article on this subject and I encourage you to go read his take on all this and I would like to quote a perfectly written analogy that he uses to describe what is happening to any given page.

Let’s take a look at one of the (Hubspot) website’s keywords — ‘marketing resources’.  You can see that you basically need a PR 5 or above to be in the Top 10.

Rank PageRank Reg.  Year          Domain
1            3                2003          http://www.marketingresources.com/
2            6                1999          http://www.marketingprofs.com/
3            6                1999          http://marketing.about.com/
4            4                1997          http://marketingresource.com/tips/
5            5                1995          http://www.resource.com/
6            5                2009          http://www.marketingsource.com/
7            7                1998          http://www.knowthis.com/
8            5                2005          http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/
9            3                1996          http://www.mrlweb.com/
10          7                2001         http://www.agmrc.org/

Read the full article HERE

So the bottom line is that Google PageRank is relevant and should be included in your overall analytics but it is not the first or even the last line in your metrics. If you dont use Google Webmaster tools, you need to get an account setup and concentrate your efforts on the quality of your content, keeping that content fresh and updated and adding fresh content on a regular basis. Good page rank is not a set it and forget it action and requires hard work and diligence in order to get and keep your listing in the search results.

I have quite a few websites that have no PageRank at all but are still on the first page of the search results for the keywords they are optimized for. In the next SEO blog post I will go into more detail on what you need to be doing on your website to position your pages and track the results.