Many are still putting much emphasis on PageRank as one of the driving forces of their search engine optimization strategies. Google’s own gauge of link popularity has been attracting attention since it was released primarily because it was a major search engine that came out with it. But there have been a lot of reports saying that the scores derived from this tool are misleading at times. Some of the data that PageRank provides are pretty out-of-date so they don’t really make an accurate representation of how a website is faring. Because of this, it’s difficult to tell with just PageRank whether or not an SEO strategy is working.

Some internet marketers couldn’t help but ask, “Does PageRank still count for a lot in SEO?”

It really depends on where you’re coming from. There are people who look at a site’s link popularity as a measure of its credibility. This may be a call not to remove that PageRank toolbar from your website as yet. There are users who actually look at the site’s rank as a credibility index. The higher the score, the better. Link popularity, after all, still measures the quality of your backlinks – at least according to Google’s standards, anyway.

On the other hand, many users believe that Google’s judgment is still something that is beyond an SEO strategy’s control. It does contribute to your website’s rankings but there are still other tools that you can try to create the same effect. So it’s probably safe to say that while PageRank still counts for a lot, it’s not the end-all, be-all of SEO. For instance, a survey showed that more than a little less than 17% of results under rank 1 garnered a better PageRank than the result on the top spot. An average of 23% of the time, results in ranks five to ten will have a better PageRank than those on of the rankings.

What do you think?

Tags: Links, Page Rank, PageRank, SEO

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