Page Rank and Alexa Rank - myths and facts
Page Rank and Alexa Rank – The Value & The MythGoogle’s Page RankPage Rank is the “value” Google has assigned a page. The ranking runs from 0 – 10. Now, before you get excited about this little graphic addendum to your world, keep in mind that any toolbars you see displaying this data are out of date. That is, the data being shown is out of date. Google does not output it’s latest “values” for pages, thus we are left to look at a graph representing data that is about 3 – 4 months old (maybe a little more, maybe a little less).So, you as the Webmaster, needed worry about what the graph says – worry about the traffic stats instead.This aging effect for Page Rank data is the biggest reason why you should never chase page Rank.Chasing Page Rank is something webmasters do thinking that by increasing the PR value for a page means that page will rank higher. Ultimately, since the data they are chasing is out of date, they may make changes that ultimately hurt the ranking of the page, but won’t know it for several months when the page suddenly drops in the rankings.Watching PR increase for a newly published page is one thing – you’d ideally want to see it go from N/A, to “0” then grow through “2” and so on.Trying to do things to a page to increase it’s PR is pointless – you’re shooting at a moving target.Alexa RankingAs for Alexa’s ranking of websites, well, it’s directly tied to how many people have the Alexa Toolbar installed on their PCs and how many of THEM (and only that group of users) go to a website.So, if 1,000,000 people are using the Alexa Toolbar, and 3 of them go to your website, your site will have a very poor rank according to Alexa. What this data cannot show, is that every day, you have 10,000 visitors on your website. We know that 3 are Alexa users, so that means, simply, that folks visiting your website DO NOT have the Alexa Toolbar installed.Alexa says you rank poorly – I say skip this piece of useless data and dig into your logs to get an idea of how you’re really doing.To summarize:Don’t chase Page Rank and don’t worry about what Alexa thinks of you.When you SHOULD look at Page RankAbout the only real value this indicator has for you, is in helping to determine who you should target for link building purposes. In essence, you’d like to have sites with similar PR vales to your own pointing one-way links to you. Pepper in a few sites with higher PR vales and stir.No sense trying to get a PR 8 website linking to your PR 2 site – they’re so far apart, Google will think something amiss. I mean, a PR 8 site is a TRUE authority/resource. This would be like CNN linking directly to my personal website – might happen, and would drive a boat-load of traffic, to be sure, but the two just aren’t in the same league.It does happen, though, that a higher PR site might link to a page of yours with a lower PR value. Maybe you wrote an article and they are suggesting their users check it out. It can legitimately happen, but it’s safest to solicit links form sites (and from actual pages) with PR values similar to your own. Over time your pages values will grow and you can expect more links from higher PR values pages to point to your content.When trying to determine who to approach for link requests, the PR data can provide a useful trend to target.
