Blog Tipz

Google recently updated nearly every site’s PageRank on Wednesday. This site went from a PageRank of three to two. Does that mean that I was penalized for selling links? Technically, no “links” were sold other than those that appeared as banner ads in the sidebar. Did I change the way I blogged or wrote articles? Not really.

So, why should I care about the PageRank update, the decrease in PageRank, or any other factors associated with it?

Well, first of all, PageRank is simply a factor in Google’s ranking system that determines how “popular” a website is against others. It is simply a factor that people tend to use to generate an importance of a website against others, especially when going to buy or sell a site. In truth, it has little to do with this, and changes quite often (several times per year), resulting in a site that could go from an importance of six to three, and vice versa, without a huge change in the number of links pointing to that site.

Reasons to Not Care About Your PR

Listed below are a few reasons I don’t really see a reason to change what I have been doing just because my PageRank has either increased or decreased.

1. When you see a drop in PageRank (often seen as a penalty), you aren’t really doing anything wrong. If more sites approach a PageRank of 10 (which takes a long time), an adjustment may be made based on the algorithm to adjust all other sites for this change, somewhat like a distribution. This is just a theory, but may have been the cause for some drops in PR over the past.
2. An increase in PageRank means that your site has gained some links from other sites. Whether it was through a request, a comment (if the blog is “DoFollow”), or posts that you have written have been heavily linked to, due to popularity. Traffic, number of comments, or revenue from the site don’t necessarily grow during this period.
3. Google is simply a company that happens to operate an extremely powerful and popular search engine. A majority, or at least a significant portion, of your traffic, is delivered through their tools. You either have to live with the fact that they have “awarded” your site a lower PageRank or stop blogging and creating websites. There is really no way to get it back when you lost it unless they explicitly tell you what you did wrong, give you a listing of other sites that have performed the same as yours over the period, and all the secrets to their algorithm – all of which won’t happen.
4. Complaining about a decrease in PageRank or saying that you deserve a higher PR won’t instantly increase it. Building websites that conform to what most users are looking for, while still being conservative about how you go about doing it, likely will. You don’t have to be an expert at creating websites/blogs to get the idea about how to lay out and organize a blog.
5. On selling a website: PR should rarely be used when selling a website. Someone will buy your website based on the number of visitors, revenue, growth, subscribers, and sites that link to it. Yes, PageRank might be considered one of the forces involved in this equation, but in general, it cannot be used as the sole basis of selling or buying a website.
6. On selling advertisements: Again, would you rather buy an ad on a website based on a PageRank of 3 or daily visitors of 2,000? Personally, those two thousand advertisers are going to be more appealing to me, even if I were selling permanent text links.

Conclusion

If there was a ranking system that was used to help everyone determine the “value” of their website, I am sure that we would all base our site against that. However, there isn’t and probably will never be. PageRank might be worthy of consideration in a few cases, especially pertaining to how your site ranks in the search engine (although not directly), but perhaps only in that example.

Under no circumstance should you base your blog’s value on a theoretical value that might change the very next day. Over time, base it on how your blog has grown and what someone could expect to see from it should they buy it. Don’t let a company that might never look at your blog how your site is performing, especially “against” all other blogs/websites.