Does Page Rank Really Matter?

At the end of September the webmaster forums were all-a-twitter in that Google seemed to be performing a page rank update. The first in many, many, months. Webmasters were desperately scanning the various datacentres to see if their page ranks had changed or not and reports were flying thick and fast. But it seems that no proper update of page rank was forthcoming. So, does it actually matter?

In a way page rank is critical, but in another it's totally irrelevant. Google uses page rank as an algorithmic measure of how important a website is (ie its rank in comparison to other similar websites, based on the number of links coming into a site and the 'authority' of those sites (ie their page rank).

As a result sites began to scan page rank and there grew a market around selling links from sites with high page rank. A site with high page rank could command a fair amount of money for selling links. Which distorted the natural, organic, growth of links to websites. Obviously this created an artificial skewing of results and Google didn't like this. So they began clamping down on the selling of links.

Now it seems that they are obfuscating page rank. The rank shown in Google's toolbar, or even on Google's datacentres may not actually represent the true page rank or ranking of a site. Indeed, I run the Celtnet and Celtnet Recipes sites. Both these currently have a PR of 0 yet I've managed to grow my traffic five fold in the past six months and my income almost ten fold. If the observed page rank was the true arbiter of a site's quality and position in the search engines then this could not happen.

Which does lead to a bit of a problem. Because higher page rank gives a site more 'juice' in terms of website ranking and getting links is the only way to improve your position in the search engines many webmasters have decided to only exchange links with high PR sites (typically 3 and above). But if page ranks are no longer accurate, how do webmasters with good sites but low PR (artificially low, it seems) exchange links?

We're in the position of having another artificial stewing of how websites are percieved and the placing of a huge barrier in front of new entrants into the field.