Does Google Page Rank Really Matter Any More? Jonathan Leger

The “received wisdom” used to be that high page rank pages got — well higher page ranking on Google’s search results. That’s not true any more so you wonder why they call it page rank?

Here’s a thoughtful article on the subject. If you’re interested in this, it’s worth clicking through to the whole article.

From Jonathan Leger

As of this writing, the site that ranks #7 on Google for the phrase “play games” is playrelax.com. This site has a PageRank of 4. Care to guess what ranks #8 for the phrase? Yahoo! Games — a site with a PageRank of 8!Let’s take a very competitive phrase as another example. As of this writing, the site that ranks #4 on Google for the phrase “airline tickets” is traveldiscounters.com. This site has a PageRank of 5. The site that ranks #5 is travel.aol.com, with a PageRank of 7.

One more example, just for fun. As of this writing, the site that ranks #1 on Google for the phrase “newspaper obituaries” is newspaperobituaries.net. This site has a PageRank of 4. The site that ranks #2 is legacy.com, with a PageRank of 7!

Are you stunned? Does it seem amazing to you that a site with a PageRank of 4 can beat out a PR7, or even a PR8 site, ranking ahead of the much higher PR sites in Google?

Don’t be stunned. It’s not really amazing.

To understand why this happens, you need to understand how a site gets PageRank. A high PageRank can be achieved two ways:

1. Getting a lot of links from low PageRank pages.
2. Getting a few links from high PageRank pages.

So if you got a million links from low PR pages, you’re going to have a high PageRank, or if you get a few links from very high PR pages, you’re going to have a high PageRank.

But you see, it’s not the PageRank of a site or page that Google focuses on primarily when ranking a site for a set of keywords. It’s the keywords that those links contain that is of the greatest value in Google’s algorithm.

For example, the PR4 site (playrelax.com) has 1,231 links (according to Yahoo!), whereas Yahoo! Games has a boatload of links (1,212,619). How is it possible that playrelax.com is winning the game if it has so few links in comparison?

I can gurantee you that most of the links pointing to Yahoo! don’t contain the keywords “play games” as often as they do in the links pointing to playrelax.com (and many of Yahoo! Games links come from their own site). But the owner of the other site, playrelax.com, probably realizes that in order to out-rank the others, his site must have links that contain the right keywords. He gets the right kind of links, and he wins the game.

No doubt this is the case with almost all of the lower PR sites that are beating out their higher PR competition.

Read it all