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.

A further cautionary tale.

Once more, I've been letting things slip on my website, but now I'm back taking care of things (hey, I got married and my wife is still awaiting a visa for the UK so I do have some excuse!). But to get back to the matter at hand...

If you've been reading any of my posts then you know that I'm reporting on my attempts to convert the >celtnet into a money-making venture. I've been posting odd bits and pieces here since I began and I've used this as a forum to show what I've been doing in terms of what works and what doesn't.

My website is basically divided into three parts: Celtnet which deals with Celtic deities and Celtic literature; Celtnet Information which is an information portal to information on technology and medicine and finally: Celtnet Recipes which is the recipe-associated part of my site.

As you might imagine, these parts of the website actually contain a fair amount of information, some of which is completely unique to the site. OK, so I've been posting regular articles to ezinearticles.com and that's resulted in numerous publications of those articles and quite a few back-links. It's been showing results by improving my Google rank and getting more visitors to the site. I've even posted answers to Yhoo! Answers and those have brought-in more links. But the trick I really missed was Wikipedia.

After all, if you look at just about any query in Google, what's there in the top 10? You guessed it, Wikipedia. It has an amazing google rank of 8 and if you really want your site to get good ranking and positioning then if you can get back-links off Wikipedia that's pretty amazing. If you've perused the recipe section of my site then you will see that I have a passion for African cooking. The fact that my wife's West African, and my liking for hot chillies probably helps in this respect! Anyway, on my recent trips to Senegal I've been visiting the markets and collecting samples of native herbs and spices. This has given me access to recipes and information on spices that are not on Wikipedia (and are hardly anywhere else on the web either). As a result I have articles and images of these spices and I write articles on them for Wikipedia. That way I can give back-links to my own pages as the original source (which it is) and I can also give links to recipes where those spices are used (again on my web page). This gives me two very good back-links for the price of one article. Ever since I started this I've seen my income from AdSense almost double. And with some judicious ad placement I'm getting conversions of up to 2.6% which isn't at all bad!

There's also another repository, Cunnan, a repository of Mediaeval recipes and I've started posting articles there as well. After all I have a huge range of Medieval recipes on my site. Why not use this resource as well?

The thing is, use the talents you have. I'm a writer, poet, cook and scientist and I can use all those skills to bolster my website. The aim in the end is to get visitors and to get as many of those visitors to generate income as possible. A few simple steps, if you have an information-rich website with novel content, at least, could net you big gains in terms of visitors.


I've also been trialling Kontera for additional adverts on my site. I'll check back with you as to how this preforms. Then there's Yahoo! Answers which I've been using to answer recipe-related questons and plugging varous URLs from my site in the process.

All these are more and new ways of getting my site noticed and of gaining visitors to the site.