PR Validity

[TelecomHunter]

I was reading an article the other day from an SEO newsletter and they basically said to not even pay attention to the Google Page Rank on the Google toolbar. I have notive that it does have a mind of its own, but should we still be paying attention to it?

www.broadbandhunter.com

[iamrussell]

Could you post a link or copy the article?

[jbgilbert]

Was that the article at Planet Ocean's Search Engine News?

[TelecomHunter]

Here is the reply from the newsletter:

Jill,

I know of three (unrelated) sites that had good Google PR, they now
have PR=0 on their homepages. Sub-pages still have good PR, but back
links are missing for 2 of the 3 sites. They are still listed well for
their relevant search terms and I am not aware of any SEO faux pas.
Any thoughts?

James

++Jill's Response++

Hi James,

You have no reason to worry about what you're seeing. The toolbar
PageRank number doesn't mean anything at all these days. For one
thing, it hasn't been updated in more than 3 months according to the
forum scuttlebutt that I've seen. (I don't pay any attention to it
myself so I have to go by what I read in that respect.)

It used to be if you saw a PR0 for your site, that meant it was
penalized. However, that's simply not true anymore. It often just
means the toolbar is having a bad hair day, and not able to properly
retrieve the info that it should.

Don't waste another minute looking at it or thinking about it. In
fact, I would highly suggest that you simply remove that feature from
your Google toolbar (click on the down arrow next to the Google logo,
select Options, and uncheck the PageRank box under Page Information).
You'll be a lot happier surfing without it, because it's a completely
useless measurement these days.

Bottom line is that your rankings, traffic and sales aren't having any
problems. Why create a problem that doesn't exist, over a measurement
that means nothing?

Before you all write in, up in arms because you've had it so ingrained
into your heads that PageRank has everything to do with how your site
will show up in the search engines -- it doesn't. PR is one factor
out of many, plus the PR that you see in the toolbar is not an
accurate representation of true PR anyway. Look at any search results
page and you'll see that the sites are in no way sorted in PageRank
order. That says a lot. As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my link
popularity article <http://www.highrankings.com/linkpopularity.htm>,
yes, links are important, but PageRank isn't. They are not the same
thing.

Broadband Providers DSL Providers T1 Providers

[TelecomHunter]

any thoughts?

[bhartzer]

any thoughts?

Yes, here's my thought:

Don't pay attention to the Google Page Rank on the Google toolbar.

Google toolbar PR is unreliable. Not only that, it's not correct because it's only updated on a Quarterly basis now. In fact, you might even consider un-installing the Google Toolbar.