It’s on the minds of many SEOs and website owners every few months or so. It’s green, about 100 pixels wide and it sits on top of your browser window. It’s your visible toolbar PR, or PageRank, and it’s Google’s way of telling you how well your website is doing.
But is it really important? Should you be worrying about your toolbar PR at all?
In a word, no. The little green bar is really only something for amateur website owners to chat about on forums, bragging how their bar is slightly greener than their contemporary’s bars. It’s a symbol of how many links you’ve got pointing at your website, but not the relevance and quality of the links. It’s not a measure of rankings within the SERPs and it’s not a measure of traffic.
To worry about how green your bar has become is to worry about the insignificant things in life. Concentrate on making your website stronger, adding more content to your site, creating more reasons for people to link to you and for people to visit your website again.
The phrase ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves’ applies to your PageRank as well. Look after your website and your PR will take care of itself, not that it really matters anyway.
So don’t pester your SEO company about when your PR will increase, pester them about your traffic levels instead, that’s far more important.
[...] How can you increase your PageRank? The subject of Google PageRank is something we’ve written about many times before, usually to dismiss its importance as your PageRank really doesn’t matter. [...]