I read an entry on SocialSpark written by Ritualistic, that goes over the worthlessness of Google PageRank, and why Google PR is so unfair it’s a pretty interesting article, but mostly just goes over the unfairness of paid posting with PayPerPost, or other paid review sites.  You have to give credit to some companies like ReviewMe.com which goes completely on traffic stats to your site.  Which although traffic stats are not completely accurate for what will or won’t actually bring in people to your website it is a better determiner than PageRank.  It reminds me of a blog entry I wrote a while ago on another site that I often blog for about the worthlessness of PageRank and how to actually search for valuable links to your site… something these companies should be doing when using places like ReviewMe, PayPerPost, or SocialSpark.  (I wrote this in reference to my site ArchmailleDesigns.com)

Does anyone here know what PR does?  Yeah… I didn’t think so… neither do I, nor does your neighbor, his dog, nor even Google.  Maybe that’s why they’re contemplating a major change in PR.  If I have a PR8 website about raising chickens pointing to my little sterling silver jewelry store that may even increase my page rank from the current PR4 to a whopping PR7!!!! Pretty exciting news isn’t it?  Except… it still doesn’t help.  You see “sterling silver jewelry” is one of the main terms that I am trying to get ranks for with my website, but if I don’t have sites that are at least about jewelry pointing to my site what’s the point?  Google (although I hate to admit it) is pretty smart, and will only give a small amount of credit coming from the chicken raising PR8 to my sterling silver jewelry PR4 and it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still only one incoming link from a larger website.

So what does pagerank actually do?  In all honesty… nothing.  It’s a pretty little number that we can brag about around the water cooler at work “Yeah, I uh… have just recently got a PR6 on my main site and have 3 PR5’s and nothing I own goes below a PR4 anymore.”  “Okay Frank… whatever, then why are you still working here?”  The point is… pagerank means squat.  I mentioned a couple times above that I’m striving for the term “sterling silver jewelry” yeah, well I’m not doing so bad 13th place in google right now, not great, but not bad.  Funny thing is my site is a PR4, some of the websites above me in the SERP’s (search engine result page’s) are PR3’s and even more humorous is the ones below me… far… far below me that are PR5’s or 6’s.  Why as search engine marketers do we fight so strongly for pagerank then?  Why do advertisers pay more on websites with higher pagerank?  I not only do search engine optimization for myself, I work with my cousin quite a bit to do Real Estate SEO work as well, and we’ve proven time in, time out that not even Google (the creators of pagerank) give a rats rear end about pagerank!  So why do we?

As it turns out… sometimes pagerank does mean something.  Especially for websites that were established during the early days of pagerank.  For websites that legitimately earn their pagerank it is a VERY accurate determiner of the power that site wields when you’re talking about Google SERP’s.  The problem comes in actually finding those websites, and taking advantage of them.

Key items to look for in a powerful website to help in your marketing campaign:

1) As a general rule anything PR6 or above was/is well earned.  Doesn’t mean it’s a help to you though!
2) Sites with large numbers of pages but low numbers of links are always good.
3) Sites in the same genre as yours are 10x bonus points
4) If it’s not in your same genre, and you can’t add your own content to “fool” the SE’s move on to another site.
5) Sites that allow you to create links directly within their major categories are goldmines, should be both exploited and protected from spammers.

I’ll give you an example… I’m not going to actually give you the name of the website me and my cousin have used for years however I will describe it to you and show how each of the five areas listed above are affected.  We like to use a very popular PR7 website that has 8 main categories.  Now the site on their front page (PR 7) only has some links to their other websites and the 8 main categories of the site.  They allow you to create a page  that then goes into one of the 8 main categories (depending upon what you decide it should be under).  Because of the so few links on the front page all of the categories are PR6’s… unfortunately the site has been around for so long THOUSANDS of pages have been created by many people for various reasons, which makes for thousands of links within the 8 categories and every page you create only gets a PR4.  The amazing thing is that even with the lowered link quality, the site as a whole is so popular with Google because of the thousands of pages it contains that all link directly back to it’s front page that anything you create on that site is indexed, and your site crawled and indexed by Google in a matter of minutes… literally… I’ve timed it.  It helps that the site waits until noon of the next day to publish the page you create so Google only has to come back at that time since that is when all new content is released.

Something else that you might find interesting is that my site here (codysortore.com) did get slapped by the Google PR stripping for paid posting (Just like ritualistic did)… my search results didn’t change, and have since increased, and CodySortore.com passes on PR3’s to sites… which means that my site is still a PR4 by all technical standards… it just doesn’t show it on the bar.