Lay My Hat

Aaron,

On my meanderings round the web I have heard it said that PageRank is dead. Or at least that it is not an indicator of site importance any more (particularly on the highrankings.com forum). If I remember rightly I read that Google stopped attributing Pagerank a year ago, so any site created since then has Pagerank of 0.

I just typed 'holiday rentals' into Google and the top spot goes to a site with PR 5, second has PR 0, third PR6.

Strange days at Google towers?

paolo wrote:On my meanderings round the web I have heard it said that PageRank is dead. Or at least that it is not an indicator of site importance any more (particularly on the highrankings.com forum). If I remember rightly I read that Google stopped attributing Pagerank a year ago, so any site created since then has Pagerank of 0.

There have certainly been some funny goings-on with PageRank but I can categorically say that it has been assigned in the past 12 months. We registered acheapflight.net in January of this year and it now has a PR5.

There is a think called Sandboxing that they've been doing, which means that new sites are at a disadvantage in getting PR, but the last I heard was that was possibly scrapped also.

I think there has been a lot of speculation of PR being dropped with Google going public, because Stanford own the patent to it... but it's not something I know a huge amount about, though, I'm afraid...

Aaron

I think it may have been one of my posts you read at WebPro world?

PageRank is still alive (just) but it's only been updating periodically. The last update was September, previously June? As you've seen in the SERPS it doesn't count for a whole lot. Google states it uses over 100 criteria to rank pages so this phenomena isn't really a massive surprise, PageRank just seems to have been relegated in importance.

So what's this mean to site marketing?

Don't use PR as the basis of any decisions for your site, most especially when doing link exchanges to generate inbound links. I'm instantly dubious when people start quoting their PageRank as the basis of a deal. Telling me who and how many their audience is can be a lot more helpful and we never do deals with anyone who's going to put us on a "links" page which has zip chance generating clicks.

PR is just a guide to inbound link popularity, don't treat it as anything more.

As for Sandboxing, that's a whole other topic and nobody has any definitive theory yet. Basically new sites seem to be going nowhere on major search terms, certainly for anything up to six months.

The bottom line is it's taking longer than ever to achieve good rankings: even more reason to spend time on quality SEO and solid partnerships that generate traffic. The days of packing a site with keywords and doing 3000 irrelevant link exchanges to get to No.1 are well and truly gone!

Rich

My advice : Concentrate on aquiring links that are of similar theme to your website, quality sites that your visitors will want to visit.

Keep building up the number of links pointing to your website, using 'anchor text'

Worry less about PR and more on building up quality links and researching what keyword terms holidaymakers are using to find your property.

Darren