Why You Should Not Be Obsessed Over Google PageRank

There are people who still care about their website’s PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar or other PageRank Checking Tool. Well, it’s definitely a factor for gaining a better search rank, but it’s not wise to have eyes for that thing only. A few days ago Google published an official statement that made it clear that you should focus on other things than PageRank.

What is Google Thinking about PageRank?

Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst on Google was pretty clear on this issue..
“The Webmaster Central team has been telling webmasters for years that they shouldn’t focus so much on PageRank as a metric for representing the success of one’s website.”

“The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.”

“PageRank may have distinguished Google as a search engine when it was founded in 1998; but given the rate of change Manber describes—launching “about 9 [improvements] per week on the average”—we’ve had a lot of opportunities to augment and refine our ranking systems over the last decade. PageRank is no longer—if it ever was—the be-all and end-all of ranking.”

Okay, so what should we really care about?

Three things that Susan suggested are:

  1. Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors to your site who converted in a sale or lead or whatever you want them to do.
  2. Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to your site who left your page without visiting another one or just left your page immediately after landing on it.
  3. Clickthrough Rate (CTR): CTR is the percentage of clicks on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results.

Those are the things you should focus on improving, but how to set course to them?

Set a Goal and Make Plans

It’s clear that a high PageRank is not what you really need. If you really want to make more money with your website, then you probably want to generate more sales or more leads or more signup to your newsletter. Let’s see what can be seriously done to achieve those goals:

  1. Choose the Right Keywords: Do not go for a high traffic keyword, instead start with low competitive keyword but highly targeted keyword (Often called ‘long tail keywords’). It is easier to get high rankings for this type of keywords and traffic from those keywords tends to convert better than the high stream of general traffic.
  2. Get as many Backlinks as you can: There are plenty of statements from Google mentioning that backlinks is what matters most. However, you need to choose your backlinks wisely as backlinks from ‘blacklisted’ niches like Gambling, Porn or Warez can do more harm than good. Try to get backlinks from within your niche.

Okay.. Here I am telling you once again. Do not be obsessed with PageRank; rather focus on other metrics, which can make you real money.

This post is written by Abhik, who talks about Online Marketing and Make Money by Blogging at ItsAbhik. If you like to know how he makes money online, go subscribe to his newsletter and follow him in Twitter.