First, it has nothing to do with Adwords… although indirectly I suppose it does. One of the reasons Adwords is so valuable is because you can go around this important factor that Google has… And it also might be a good thing if the website you are promoting has a high PR, because the visitor might see that website as being more important and more of an authority website… etc.
This is related to Search Engine Optimization and Organic Results…
Google uses PageRank, as Jen said, to measure how important a website is. It’s based on a few factors, but the main factor is how many inbound links (and the quality of those links) you have pointing to your website.
PR is combined with Googles Algorithm to determine your position in the SEarch Engine Results Pages (SERPs)… if you notice the sites at the top of the your search results have more inbound links than the those below them usually. Sometimes it’s close because the quality of links are important also. If you have a PR8 website pointing to you, you are in better shape than if you had a PR3 website pointing to you… in essence it makes your website more important…
If you install Google’s toolbar… or
http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/
…you will see a bar that says PageRank. That bar ranks a site from 1 to 10…
9 or 10 are very difficult to get. Google.com has a PR10… W3.org has a PR10… DMOZ has a PR9…
Those are websites that have a lot of links pointing to them. W3.org is considered an authority website…
It takes some effort to get to a PR5… generally I think PR5 and up is really good. A lot of people when they are out looking for people to trade links with, like to focus on people with a good PageRank…
Check this out… One of the biggest things PR is used for these days is determining the value of a web page and selling ad space based on the PR:
http://www.linkadage.com
There is a lot of controversy as far as the true importance of PR. I’ve noticed most people that are against it are people that can’t seem to get it.
The original reason it was designed was to be an indication of the importance and popularity of a website, but in true Webmaster fashion, a lot of the community set out to find a way to use Inbound Links to manipulate Google and there started the Link industry… link exchanges etc, etc….
I just saw a guy earlier today that spent over $2300 to get PR3 or better links from 50 different websites…
One of the problems with that is PR alone does not provide you traffic… You still have to have a well optimized website, have done your keyword research and considered the other 100+ factors (some known, some unknown) that Google uses to rank a site in the SERPs… PR an important factor, but it isn’t the only factor.
AND ON top of that, it’s moves like getting 100s or 1000s of UNnatural links that doesn’t give PR a good name.
Some more info:
http://www.google.com/technology/
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
|
