Pingdom Weighs In On PageRank’s Uselessness

It might be worth a bit in terms of bragging rights for a small business owner to be able to say his or her site has a PageRank of 10. It’s probably not worth much more than that, however, as new data from Pingdom proves.

Pingdom researched the PageRank of the top 100 sites in the U.S. These are sites that almost always show at the top of search results within their industry, in other words, and receive all sorts of traffic as a result. Pingdom’s key finding: "The average PR among the top 100 sites is 7.5."

Indeed, if you’re wondering about a cutoff point, PageRank can probably droop as low as 6 without creating any problems. A post on the Royal Pingdom blog stated that about one-third of the top 100 sites are PR 6 or 7. (Some scored even worse, but they turned out to be adult sites.)

Plus, several sites with a PageRank of 10 are not doing at all well, landing Alexa rankings of 533 (www.w3.org), 989 (www.sciencedirect.com), 10,096 (www.usa.gov), or worse.

So try not to devote too much time (and especially not too much money) to chasing a high PageRank. These facts indicate that there’s no real point in doing so.

There are 5 Comments. Add Yours.

Kenneth kowalsky
January 16, 2010 at 10:53 am

I disagree In the way this study’s results are interpreted because it only measured the top 100 websites which naturally have all sorts of quality back links pointing to them or they wouldn’t be in the top 100 within their industry.

And what exactly does it mean to to be top ranked "within their industry"? Even if A website has lots of backlinks and is properly optimized doesn’t mean it will rank well for every keyword associated for the industry.

Instead, go to Google and search under an uncommon keyword such as "ice tea mix" -or whatever- and take a look at the PageRank of the results on the first page compared to the PR out of the results on the fifth page; you’ll see that the PR of the page-one listings are, in general, significantly higher than the ones on page five.

All the study above does is confirm what anyone who knows anything about SEO has known for years now… that PageRank has some real value but is not the end-all and be-all criteria in determining how a webpage will rank for a given keyword.
Jay
January 16, 2010 at 8:34 am

I have very few sites that have ANY PageRank nowadays, it used to be the be-all and end-all, but now, as you say it is apparently worthless.

I have a brand new site that is ranking #.3 for it’s niche keyword out of 1.6m in google.com and #1 in the UK – it has barely any off-page optimisation at all…. bad news for the link-buyers….
Body& Bath Gift Baskets
January 23, 2010 at 8:30 am

Google Pagerank should be viewed as just an indicator of the number of quality links point back to a given web site. All things being equal, the higher the pagerank, the better a site will be ranked in search engines results. However pagerank is just one of many factor determining how well a site will doin search engines results. Keep in mind all search engines thrive to provide the most relevant websites to a given search query.
Johnny
January 30, 2010 at 9:00 am

Stop reading the rhetoric by junk SEO dealers. PageRank is and will always be an indicator of which sites have the most links pointing to them. It has never been about quality links because you can’t define a quality link.

PageRank never ensured a web page ranked higher than another web page. It never will.

If you’re an SEO consultant stop. You’re assumption that the so-called SEO elite who talk in forums know what they’re talking about just shows you haven’t done your own studies to back up their claims.
Websites
February 7, 2010 at 10:02 pm

Although its relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google has added more and more criteria to site rankings, it still goes hand in hand with SEO and every webmaster out there wants to have a high PR



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Pingdom Weighs In On PageRank’s Uselessness

Even top sites live in the PR 7-8 range

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