Why Google PageRank Still Matters - A Lot

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A common refrain these days is that Google Pagerank no longer matters. This is said so often that people now believe it totally and espouse this belief to others. The only problem is: there’s no word from Google that PageRank is any less important than it used to be. So, officially, no one has any real reason to think it’s true.

The Visible ToolBar PageRank is rarely updated

And I think this is where the idea that PR doesn’t matter anymore comes from. In the “old days” of a few years ago, you could easily see that PR mattered. It would update so often than you could visually see the effect of linking from one site to another. In an effort to prevent gaming the algo, Google added a huge delay to what you actually seen on the toolbar. Often, the toolbar PR will be six months or more outdated. That’s why people “see” PR 0 pages always beating higher ones. Of course the actual, internal PR is much higher than what they’re seeing. This causes them to assume it doesn’t matter.

You need high PR to get spidered frequently

Here’s the most important reason to have at least a somewhat “high PR”: it will make it so that the spiders from Google visit your website more often, and add your content to their index quickly. If you’re constantly updating your webpages, or adding more, than this alone is the reason that PR still matters. Time is money. The quicker you can get a new page into the “earning stage”, the better off for you.

You can’t see electricity, yet it’s still there, powering your TV set

Just because you see a delayed Toolbar PR value, don’t be fooled. PR is always being internally calculate by Google, and still has a great impact on how well many websites earn.

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