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.

The Earnestness of Absence

I know that it's been a long while since I updated this blog... and that's never a good thing. My excuse is that I've been madly working on my website. The site has expanded in so many ways that I needed to give it a complete overhaul. So, not only does the Nemeton Home Page have a completely new look and feel and should make it much easier to navigate and find the various sections of the site.

The Celtnet Recipes recipe section of the site has also had a major overhaul and now has almost 5000 recipes from all corners of the glove in the database. No mean feat as all the recipes are edited and annotated by me before being published. There's no copying and pasting of standard recipes going on here. As you can imagine, all this means that I've been extremely busy, hence the silence on this blog for a while.


Given that I've also updated the ClickBank Marketplace and given the ClickBank Ads Generators pages an overhaul (and, yes, they're still free for anyone to publish and create their own ClickBank-based ads on these pages) you can see that I've been busy.

Of course, all this effort is in aid of the One Million People Campaign that I and my website support, so all the effort is worthwhile! And now I'm onto the Celtnet Celtic section of the site. That bit of the website that actually kicked everything off so many years ago now.

What this comes down to is SEO. Websites change and adapt and the whole look and feel of websites also changes and adapts. To make certain your website is taken seriously you need to keep the site looking young and fresh and that means keeping up with the latest trends. Some of this is easy as I've used CSS from the start. But there's still a fair amount of re-engineering involved as I was learning CSS as I was going on. I now have a nice design developed for the recipes section of the site and I want to roll that out everywhere. It uses pure CSS to ensure that the central most important information part of the page appears first in the HTML so that the indexing spiders see this first.

But, as is often the case, all this frenetic activity has meant that I dropped the ball on several important SEO factors. The first of these is not doing enough link checking. I've ended up with hundreds of broken links for one reason or another and we all know that the search engines hate broken links and will penalize your site for it. I've been busy cleaning-up these broken links over the past few days and already my rankings and traffic are both climbing.

The other thing I ignored was a proper, systematic, approach to getting more in-bound links. Now, I'd been working hard on writing articles as ways of getting in-bound links and this was working quite well for me. Between January and April I tripled the traffic to my site (and did the same for my income). Which was great, but I kind of left things to stabilize at that level and that wasn't good.

Now, optimizing my ad placements helped raise revenue and that I did as part of my overall re-design (and it worked!). Then I had to go away and leave everything for almost three weeks and visitors fell. All the hard work in writing articles was only really working as long as I kept writing articles. I needed better ways to get links. So began a campaign of proper link building and link exchanges. I began writing articles for Wikipedia again as well as leaving recipes and comments on blogs. I also began using digg and other sites to promote my various web pages.

This led to an extra 400 in-bound links in the first week and my traffic and income began to climb again. Basically it means that the old stalwarts of the internet biz aren't dead at all. And if you want to make a profit then you need to keep working on your link-building. Write articles, exchange links, leave comments, join forums. Basically use any means you can to get links to your site 'out there'. And make certain that you get plenty of deep links into your site as well.

If you want more tips like this, then why not have a look at the How to Maximize your Web Traffic page where you can sign-up to a free six-part e-course on driving more traffic to your site. Just think what you could do if you could triple your website's traffic in three months (or even less!)

And, if you have a recipe-related site why not sign-up for a link exchange with the Celtnet Recipes Links reciprocal links page?