When it comes to Internet marketing, the rules can change quickly – sometimes overnight. As marketers, most of us have been meticulously developing our SEO strategies to achieve the best possible Google Page Rank for a while now. According to SEO pros, your Google Page Rank may not even matter anymore. But before you completely wipe this metric off your marketing to-do list, let’s take a closer look at why Page Rank has become irrelevant.
Page Rank cannot be tracked
Metrics are only useful if they can be tracked, and Page Rank is not one of those metrics. Even if you still check your Page Rank, Google delays that information for up to nine months. So, tracking the metric in real-time is impossible, making it useless for assessing your current performance.
Page Rank does not affect SEO
The link between Page Rank and SEO is fragile at best. Plenty of websites have a Page Rank of zero, and yet they still manage to get organic rankings and traffic for competitive search terms. Why bother with a number that does not affect your Web traffic’s “bottom line?”
Page Rank is not relevant for social media or real-time results
Social media content and real-time news are becoming increasingly relevant for search results. Page Rank really has nothing to do with either of these. A tweet may have a Page Rank of zero, but it still makes its way into search results. And, breaking news stories – which are only a few minutes old – also come out on top in search results, and yet they haven’t had time to build a Page Rank either.
Page Rank is not a results-driven metric
Marketing metrics are all about results. Businesses want to keep track of things that get real results, such as revenue and customers, or things that lead to those results, such as leads. Page Rank can’t tell you if your marketing efforts are yielding any of those results, so why should businesses worry about it?
When you examine the facts, it really doesn’t make sense to worry about your Google Page Rank anymore. So, what should you do to improve your SEO performance? Your best bet for getting found online is to create useful and interesting content, optimizing it for search and promoting it through social media. In other words, although the rules may change, you can always count on the importance of great content for getting the online marketing results you want.
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