Page Rank - What's the Point?

[fizzbird]

Everyone knows the importance of page rank and getting inbound links, etc, etc.
Can I be stupid and ask - does it matter? If google does what it says (i.e. provide results most relevant to your enquiry and punishes sites that try to manipulate this) then surely now that everyone has booked their seat on the backlink bandwagon then google will have changed their strategy to counter this?

I have tried and tried and tried to cultivate links to my site and yet still have a page rank of 0.

However, on "wedding day worries" I can wipe the floor with 1,860,000 other sites!

If anyone can explain this to me I would be grateful?

[ian-d]

Page rank is a nonsense and only gives an opinion of what your rank is for google, links do matter though, but ideally from very relevant terms. The way i've always looked at it is that if you want a site to appear high in google, the content needs to be perfect for the searches typed in, and your site must be well recommendated/rated and reputable. Google is a BOT, it doesn't know that a brand is a good brand unless it can see quality inbound traffic, thats way its important!

For your specific example, your wiping the floor with them because the large majority of the results will be focused around 'wedding' or 'wedding day' or even just 'day', not the combined string of that specific search...which it deems you are king of. You'd need to be working a lot hard for top position on the words i mentioned.

I have sites top rated with 600,000,000 searches, but google etc needs to be able to see match content etc, it can't just guess.

[tbp]

Page rank is quite over rated really. It does help you a lot if you are competing on very general terms, with vast amounts of competition, but lots of other factors play a part such as the age of the domain etc.

If you are after long tail keywords, such as two or three word searches for example (and you can get huge amounts of traffic from these!), its really irrelevant.

On specific two word or three word searches, I can get a brand new site to number one in google in a couple of days, so it shows its not the be all and end all.

Don't get me wrong, its good to have, and the more sites you have linking to you the better, in terms of the amount of traffic they bring rather than just page rank, but its not something to obsess over!

Also remember that whilst googles internal page rank for the page is updated pretty much daily, your external pagerank shown in the google toolbar for example, is only updated every 3 months. So although your site could show 0 now, when its updated, if you`ve gained lots of links in the mean time, it could jump to a 2 or a 3 for example, it doesn't mean that your current link building is doing nothing.

[Rynert]

Your site have no real back links of value and once Google gets to you it can only find a small number of articles and none of them (as far as I can see) link out to any valuable resource on the subject (just Adsense).

You have a links page, but even that is around 40-50% affiliate links.

So, keep adding content and link out to valuable resources - eventually Google will notice you

[globoChris]

Always opt for relevance over pageRank.

[fizzbird]

Originally Posted by Rynert Your site have no real back links of value and once Google gets to you it can only find a small number of articles and none of them link out to any valuable resource on the subject.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Say, for example, 'Wedding Insurance - Is it Worth It?'
Would outbound links to providers of wedding insurance be helpful or detremental. Would links to similar articles be better?

Or am I missing your point altogether?

thanks

Helen

[Rynert]

You link out to affiliate schemes for your wedding insurance. In isolation this wont be seen as good or bad. If you entire site only linked to affiliates Google may not perceive the site to have much informational value.

Google likes to see links to 'authority' sites - by that I don't mean the merchants.

See this page on my site : White Dove Release for Wedding for what I mean

[fizzbird]

Originally Posted by Rynert You link out to affiliate schemes for your wedding insurance. In isolation this wont be seen as good or bad. If you entire site only linked to affiliates Google may not perceive the site to have much informational value. Google likes to see links to 'authority' sites - by that I don't mean the merchants.

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I understand now - so in the example I gave to you I could add something like 'your insurer should be a member of Association of Insurers - Link, etc?

If you don't mind - one more question - would a link to say an article at news.bbc.co.uk or timesonline.co.uk be classed as an authority in this sense?

Thanks again

[Rynert]

Yes and yes (to an extent)

I say to an extent as whilst the article you link to would be about insurance, the site as a whole is not - but worth doing nonetheless

[fizzbird]

Originally Posted by Rynert Yes and yes (to an extent) I say to an extent as whilst the article you link to would be about insurance, the site as a whole is not - but worth doing nonetheless

Many Thanks