5 reasons why Toolbar Pagerank is still important
There is no other seo metric that is as widely tracked by webmasters as the toolbar pagerank. Everytime google updates the same, the entire blogosphere goes crazy. I have no doubt that you have already heard enough arguments about how the toolbar pagerank is for fun purpose alone and we need not give any importance to it. If you are talking about ranking on google alone, then I completely agree with the above. The pagerank of binaryday went down to 0 (zero) around 4-5 months back and since then my traffic has more than doubled.
While toolbar pagerank is not important for Google, it makes a big difference to our life as bloggers because of the following 5 reasons that I will explain in detail in the later part of this post
- The attention span of other bloggers is impacted by the toolbar pagerank of your blog
- To know if your seo attempts are moving in the right direction
- To identify strong pages on your blog and use them to improve ranking of other pages
- For getting review offers, advertisements other than cpc advertisements
- Sheer bragging value
The attention span of other bloggers is impacted by the toolbar pagerank of your blog
Be honest. We tend to judge other bloggers based on the pagerank of their blog. At least the first impression, the amount of time we spend to get to know them etc is impacted by that little green bar. If you get emails from 2 bloggers, one with a pagerank of 5 and another one with a pagerank of 0, and if you can answer only 1 of the 2 which one will you answer first? If you can not follow a blog post with 0 pagerank then you conclude it is crap. If the same post were wriiten on a blog with pagerank 7, you would have probably concluded that it is beyond you. In a world where majority of users have too short attention span, a higher pagerank gets us a little more time to impress that blogger who may end up giving us a link, digg or stumble.
To know if your seo attempts are moving in the right direction
Fortunately or unfortunately, pagerank is the only seo metric that is published by Google. Trust me if you are not trying some fancy seo tricks, then pagerank tends to be a really good measure of the progress of your seo attempts. In the absence of pagerank, all that you can do is guess work. The importance of this point is less for bloggers more comfortable with seo and a lot higher for newbies.
To identify strong pages on your blog and use them to improve ranking of other pages
I am not sure if you are aware of this really powerful seo trick or not. If you are targetting some not so competitive keywords, then you can easily rank in the first page of Google by simply linking to it from strong internal pages. What is the easiest way to identify strong internal pages? Right..that green bar on google toolbar.
For getting review offers and advertisements
Have you ever tried to earn money from paid reviews or for getting included in advertisement networks other than adsense while your pagerank is 0? The fact is even today majority of request for reviews and advertisements are targetted at boosting search engine ranking. In the absence of better metric and because of laziness the buyers tend to focus too much on the pagerank. A good pagerank enables you to make a decent amount of money selling links as well.
Bragging value
How I wish I could stand in a bloggers meet and claim that I have a PR 5 blog. That 5 minute alone is worth all the fight that I shall have to put to convince google that I have not used any shady tactics and regain my pagerank.
Looking forward to your views on the topic. Hopefully you will not go by the pagerank of my blog and leave some comments 
My point is, why not have that higher PR when it is easy to secure? Just avoid these mistakes!
• Having too many outbound links- Google gets suspicious of too many links to external pages, link selling and posts that are paid for.
• Too many links from already suspicious pages. It’s just about bad association!
• Links to sites that are blacklisted
• Too many links to your homepage
• Links with ‘do follow’ tags are also suspicious
• Links having duplicate posts.
• Websites that do not have quality content, rarely updated content or content that is copied.
Avoid these mistakes and your rankings will improve!
Nice point Sita…
moreover I agree with your point on getting paid reviews and more option of advertisement.
I recently got PR 4 and since then I’m getting lots of paid reviews and direct advertisement offer.
@aafter and @Paranoid
Good points there. Unfortunately binaryday has lost all pagerank and I have no clue why. Especially since I have never sold any link till date.
Hey.. i was trying this gadget out for my blog (address hyper-linked to my name above) and found N/A response. I really don’t understand what is going wrong. PR of zero would have made sense but N/A just doesn’t make sense. Can you tell me what could be going wrong?
PR gives how valuable your web page is.
There is speculation that Google maintains two PagrRank application.
1. One is external which we see on websites.
2. The second is internal which Google uses for its own internal usage. (Perhaps this would explain why BinaryDay traffic increased even though the “external” PR became 0).
This article is straight from the heart and sums up the reasons why higher PR is a much valued thing among the webmasters. Personally I would like a higher PR to brag about. It is also true that when I see a site for the first time, I look at its PR to see gauge how important it is.
Nice article overall.
@Prashant,
It normally means either google has not assigned a pagerank to your blog yet or your blog has been penalized. I suspect that you have not been assigned a pagerank.
It isn’t penalized as i do come up in Google searches and get traffic from it. Is there a way to get a pagerank assigned?
@Prashant,
Google has different types of penalty. Sometimes it just takes your pagerank out but does not impact the ranking. I have covered that part on the first paragraph.
Buddy, did you apply for reconsideration? I don’t see any reason for them to penalize you. What do you feel? I hope an application would work as you have much quality articles.
@Tarun
I think the different pagerank theory is not a speculation but a reality. However the difference is primarily because of timing difference except for cases where google has given a pagerank penalty to the sites it suspects as selling links.
@Pavan,
I am trying to investigate in a step by step manner and develop some tool to identify the reason for such penalty. Will apply for reconsideration if I do not succeed in some more time.
@ Admin and Pavan
I replied 4 times! Got rejected all the times with following reason codes (from first time to 4th time):
1. Unacceptable site content
2. Issues: Postal address incorrect or not provided
Or Unacceptable site content
3. Page type
4. Postal address incorrect or not provided Unacceptable site content
It seems the one thing is common – the content of my site is not okay as per google standards.
What is the solution to this?
@Prashant,
I am rather surprised as your blog is more than 1 year old and your content is much better quality than most useless blogs that have nothing but adsense as content.
About the postal address thing, does your address have a house number?
yes, it does have a house number. Does that have any implication?
One thing which i “debugged” is that i was planning to shift to wordpress. So, had created another blog with the same content. After getting adsense rejected, i deleted the blog and re-applied. They still rejected it.
Is there any thing like “adsense support” where they could pin point to the problem?
When I take a look at my search hits landing pages, it’s very clear that those pages with good PR are mainly getting hit (unless we did a Google Trends based short term traffic targeting). So toolbar PR is still important. Moreover, still many monetization tools (reviews, text link ads, private ads) depend on it. Most of us will be doomed if Google PR becomes irrelavant as many small blog’s existence is around the above mentioned monetization tools… AdSense alone won’t be a long term solution.
Site, great post.
I have one doubt. I have seen lots of traffic on my blog post which is not at all ranked by PR.
what is the relationship between PR of a page and its traffic?
@Ajith,
I completely agree with you. That was the motivation behind this post as all the seo forums seem to be propoagating this view that PR is irrelevant, which I do not agree with.
@Nihar,
The equation between PR and traffic is not that strightforward.
For example a page with low PR but highly optimized body may rank higher and hence get more traffic. Or another post may rank in the third page but target a very popular keyword and hence may get a lot of traffic.
I suggest you check out http://binaryday.com/Search-Engine-Ranking-Factors.ppt for a better understanding of factors that impact the ranking and hence target.
Can you elaborate on age affecting page rank a little more? Is that just because it takes a while to do everything right and improve rank or is it really that Google gives merit to being around longer?