In the search engine optimization industry, many webmasters use Google PR (PageRank) as a standard quality factor – when buying and selling sites, building backlinks, doing link exchanges, and more. Google PR is not a good quality indicator, though.

There are two primary reasons that PR is not a good quality indicator of a website, link, etc.

1. Google PR only indicates link popularity. Google PageRank is only an indicator of how many links point to a particular page or site. A site’s page rank does not in any way reflect how much traffic the site gets, how well optimized the content is, how it ranks in the search engines, or any other quality factor.
2. Google PR is not up to date. The PageRank that we can see for a site is only updated roughly every three months. Plus, when Google updates the visible PR, they use data several weeks old. This means that when you see a site’s PR, it’s actual PageRank could be very different from what you see.

While Google PR may make a convenient shortcut to determine the quantity (and to an extent, quality) of a site’s backlinks, it is not a good factor to use to determine a site’s quality.

Tags: Marketing, Internet Marketing //