Question: How Important Is PR (PageRank)

My website has a PR of 2. Is that good? How important is Page Rank?

Answer

First, Google's Page Rank system goes from zero to ten, with 0 being lowest, 10 being highest. Most of my sites - even the ones I have done little to promote - have a page rank of at least 4/10, so 2 seems pretty low to me.

As for how important Page Rank is...I would say, it's only as important as Google is. Or, more specifically, it's only as important as Google is to your website!

Google ranks websites based on a scale from 0 to 10, measuring the "importance" of websites. There are people who make an entire career out of analysing Google's analysis, and explaining to people what their page rank means, and how to increase it. I'm not one of those people.

So I'll put it in really simple terms. Google measures how valuable your site is,based on (basically) two things:

1. How many other sites link to your site.
2. How "valuable" those other sites are.

Yes, it's a bit recursive, because the value of the other website is based on its page rank! A site with a Page Rank of 9 that links to your site impresses Google a lot more than a site with a Page Rank of 2 that links to you.

But how important is it? As I said, it's only as important as Google is to your website. If the bulk of your web traffic comes from Google, and your Page Rank drops, you're in trouble. On the other hand, if you have a following that doesn't require a search engine to find your site, then Google's Page Rank doesn't matter (as much).

Here's an example. One of my most popular websites: The Problem Site used to have a page rank of 5 (it still does, actually). But almost every page inside the site also had a Page Rank of 5. But now the home page is the only page with PR 5. The rest of the site is PR 4.

The odd thing is, the popularity of the site has continued to grow, even as Google's importance analysis dropped. Why?

Simply because most traffic comes to this site from school websites. And school websites are notoriously undeveloped and un-promoted. Most of them have a PR of 0 or 1 (which means Google either doesn't even know they exist, or thinks they're pretty much useless.). Thus, they have virtually no effect on my PR. But they do have an ENORMOUS effect on my site traffic.

Day after day more school districts around the world are linking to The Problem Site. Google doesn't know, and doesn't care. But I do, because as long as these "unnoticed" sites continue linking to me, they drive my target audience to my site day after day.

So to answer the question "How important is Page Rank?" you need to answer: "How important is Google to my site?"