I once read that Google PageRank was fairly meaningless and had no bearing on a site's position in the search results. This came from Google itself.
A lot of online marketers and so-called SEO experts swear that it makes all the difference, especially when you have incoming links from high PR sites.
The question is, does it really have an effect? After all, the "Page" part of the name doesn't refer to web pages; it was named after Larry Page.
Furthermore, PageRank is only one factor in determining the position of a page in the search engine results page (SERP Rank). It is said that there are over 200 factors involved in calculating SERP Rank, so can PageRank have that much of an effect?
One of my blogs managed to reach Google PR3, and I was really pleased with that. But in the last couple of rounds of PR changes it fell to PR2 and now to PR1.
The strange thing is during that period and the few months before, I spent a lot of time ensuring that the blog had fresh, original content that was of value. Basically doing what Google recommend that you do.
And since its PR dropped to 1, it has had an increase in traffic from Google of around 68%.
So I'm still not convinced that PageRank makes a difference. And to be honest, if I'm getting 68% more traffic, I don't really care what its PageRank is.
