It used to be thought that a high Google PageRank (PR) meant that you would see yourself getting loads of hits on your website. By link building with other high PR websites you would increase your own PR and soon see far more traffic than you could ever have dreamed of.
But the internet moves on and so does search engine technology.
We still see the Google PageRank toolbar and look at the results, but what, if anything, does that little green bar mean? If you have a tiny green bar, or even a fully grey bar, does that mean no traffic at all will be coming your way?
Very unlikely. If you are worrying about visitors and PR you are worrying about your Search Engine Optimisation. And with SEO it is far more important to very carefully choose the keywords that you will be using and work well on building those.
So this means that you could have worked well on building your optimisation around a small set of keywords, which does not give a good PageRank. You could work on building your PageRank by mass link building, but this is not targeted and will not drive any traffic to your website.
In fact, I own two similarly themed websites, both optimised for some of the same keywords. One is a PR2 site and the other a PR3 site. Yet for some keywords one site is top, whilst for other keywords the second site is top. It all boils down to exactly how much work has been done for the specific keywords and that website. The PR of the site is not coming into it.
All that PR tells you is what the total ranking of all of the other sites that point to your page is like. If you have a lot of high PR sites pointing to you, with few links per page, then your ranking will show well. If you are only linked to from a few low ranking directories with hundreds of outgoing links per page, then your own ranking will be low.
You PR is just a measure and one of many that Google can use to determine the relevance of your site, and a measure that over time is quickly becoming less and less important to the results. Relevance of the incoming links and even human behaviour on your website are far more important measures that Google can now use to order its search results.
So do not worry too much about that little green bar. Yes, it is great to see it moving to the right when there is an update, but it is highly unlikely that any movement to the right is going to actually produce you any more visitors. I am afraid that the weight of PR isn’t that much any more and the correlation no longer exists.
