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This Just In: PageRank MATTERS!

I guess I should share the blame here: I’ve been saying “PageRank doesn’t matter” for some time now. I remember the old days (2003). The toolbar had made us all obsessed with green; in fact, we were fixated on it, when we should have been looking at other link metrics along with it.

And thus started the myth that “PageRank doesn’t matter”. I’ve heard pretty much every expert weigh in on the issue, and make the same basic point. Mike Grehan is only the latest to do so.

What’s more, one question I was asked last week had me slightly dumbfounded for a moment: “If you’re saying I can’t value links that I buy based on PageRank, how do I value how much I’d be prepared to pay for them?”

This is the stark reality: People still actually buy and sell links valued against Google’s PR score. Which is ridiculous.

Let’s step back a bit. Is PageRank “ridiculous” as a useful link popularity metric? What is a better metric to judge “rough” link popularity/power? Yahoo backlink count? That says nothing about the importance of a page’s backlinks; it just gives you a count, and the sites themselves. Of course, you could go to each of those sites, and count their backlinks. But that’s just a recursive link popularity algorithm–umm, PageRank?

I’m not saying PageRank is the end-all or the Holy Grail. It isn’t. It’s just a starting point. After checking out a page’s PR, I look for authority backlinks (.edu, .gov, DMOZ, topical authorities), I look to see if the backlinks are mostly on-topic, I look to see whether or not its links have been obtained organically vs. rented or traded, etc. But I do start with PageRank.

Let’s be honest: PageRank still matters. And it will for a while–unless, of course, Google stops showing it