Is Page Rank Really Important Now?

Since it was developed in the late 1990′s, Page Rank (PR) has been the number one objective for link builders looking to increase their website’s popularity and visibility on search engines. For experienced link builders, this is old news and for good reason, but for new comers this may be something you have never heard of and may want to avoid.

So What Is Page Rank?

Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm with a simple premise: establish the effective importance of a given page by assigning a weight to it based upon the weight of all the pages that link to it. The earlier algorithm was remarkably simple, something you could probably come up with yourself if you stopped to think about it, but it was highly effective in its day if link builders were interested in boosting their hits by simulating a high level of importance. Indeed, link builders still are stuck on establishing a high PR despite the changing times.

Page Rank is Behind the Times.

If you are still building your links with PR in mind, you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot. When PR was first established, it did its job well and made techniques like keyword stuffing obsolete. Now, however, techniques have arisen that allow a link builder to effectively cheat the Page Rank system, making legitimate attempts to establish a respectable PR not only non-effectual but entirely pointless due to the encumbrance of meaningless links.

So What Should Be Done?

Well, you may want to take into consideration the advances the internet has had in the past decade. Search algorithms are faster, and are much less vulnerable to useless keyword farms that revitalize the viability of keyword links. Even Google itself is moving away from a sole dependence on Page Rank, and when the very company that designed an algorithm moves past it, you know its time to look for greener pastures.

The time has come for link builders to advance their techniques and create websites that can not only be found, but need only reference relevant information rather than exploit every high PR link possible. Ironically, the ideal solution seems to be a realization that the old methods – that is, using keyword rich links to attract attention – rather than a focus on an increasingly obsolete rating system is the way to go.

In short, any link with keyword anchor text from a page that is Google indexed remains to be effective for improving your search engine rank; even if it is a Page Rank 0.