Google was built around PageRank. For a long time, SEOs would focus on getting high PR scores to rank well but that ended a few years ago when Google’s algorithm advanced. Now PR does have an effect on several things but it hasn’t been the place to focus legitimate SEO efforts for a while.

The question was recently raised, “should we care about PR?” My answer is “very little.” Here’s why:

If a website has PR it is most likely ok with Google and included in the index and results pages. That means it has influence within Google’s system and can be useful for getting relevant links.

Pages with PR stay out of the supplemental results… but we can’t see which pages are in the supplemental results anymore so I don’t think that is worth worrying about.

There’s some disagreement about this but pages with high PR scores get crawled more often than pages with low PR scores. This makes sense as PR is a metric of popularity and Google’s algo depends on popularity so they may as well focus their resources on these “valued” pages.

Mostly PR is considered valuable because people think it is! Most of the people buying links based on PR don’t really understand what it is or what the influence of PR is on the search results. SEOs call this “chasing the green tail”.

Over the last week Google has been dropping the PR scores of suspected link sellers. I suppose the idea is that if these sites are selling links based on PR Google can cut into their profits. Fair enough, but this trick hurts the credibility of PR more than anything because now we know the scores can be manually altered. These sites still show some PR. We know they aren’t banned. And so far all reports say Google referral traffic is steady so there is no real penalty.

PR was supposed to be an indicator of overall link strength - and thus popularity or relevance - of a web page versus all others online. This metric has never been accurate because Google can’t possibly be aware of all the pages out there and some sites deliberately block Google.

Now we have Google further, deliberately, manipulating the scores. They just don’t mean anything tangible if Google is going to assign arbitrary numbers.

Some other considerations:

• PR’s influence on the SERPs is minimal.
• PR updates normally happen every few months. It’s been over 6 since the last one.
• Visible PR that you see with Google’s toolbar is a snapshot based on old data.
• By the time you see a PR score it is out of date.

PR is more an indicator than a metric. It isn’t worth investing in with cash. It is worth paying attention to from a distance but not something to focus on. PR is about status. Status can make you marketable but only to other SEOs or people ignorant of what is going on.

I say focus on the metrics you can count on. Link building should be about relevance and traffic. If you work from this point of view you will also see an increase in your PR - the best of both worlds! If you focus on PR you may not see much increase in relevant traffic. And relevant traffic converts.

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