Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

I think I’ve caught myself saying that I wouldn’t get into the conversation about the Page Rank (PR) that is displayed on the Google Toolbar. However here I am writing a blog about the topic.

Titus Hoskins from Marketing Tool Guide recently had one of his articles published over at Site Pro News titled “The Big Google PageRank Slap - Perception Is Everything”

I felt that the article was a good read.  I often am guilty of telling people that the Page Rank displayed in the Google Toolbar is useless because it isn’t an accurate rating of what Google actually has within their system at any given time. While this is a true statement, it doesn’t mean that the PR on the Toolbar is useless as you’ll find out when you read the article.

Thoughts on Recent PR Update

In October webmasters everywhere noticed a series of updates made to the Google Toolbar Page Rank.  Aaron Wall from SEOBook said there was at least three updates.  He also goes on to say that “If you rank you rank” - Source: [Video] Google Lies: Oh My _______ Google PageRank Penalty.

I’ll have to agree that if you rank you rank.  Page Rank might be important for perception purposes like Titus Hoskins wrote about but it has very little to do with how well your site performs within the SERPs. For example, a well known directory was lowered to a PR 3. However, according to a source within the company they’ve seen a huge increase in gross sales and increased volumes of Google Bot visits. They know what they did wrong and have taken appropriate steps to correct the issue but in the meantime a really good directory got slapped with a PR 3.

Is Google’s Page Rank all that important for a sales team?

If they are looking to use a high PR as leverage while talking to a corporate big wig with money spending capability I’d say that it is highly important.  However, I say it is important only because there is a good chance that the corporate decision maker doesn’t have a clue in regards to what it is, how it helps or how it hurts. All they know is that someone showed them a scale from 0 - 10 and that the scale is tipped in the solicitors favor. This is perception working in the sales teams favor.

Is Google’s Page Rank all that important to a search engine optimizer looking to increase rankings within Google’s SERPs?

I’d have to say not so much because it has very little to no diverse affect on how well your website ranks or doesn’t rank. It has been proven countless times that a website can out rank another website with higher PR for competitive keyword terms.

Is Google’s Page Rank all that important to a mom and pop shop who wants to increase potential traffic by advertising on directories or other vertical marketing vehicles?

I highly doubt they even know what the Google Toolbar is and those that do know what it is probably have never even enabled the option to see the measurement tool. The only way it really becomes valuable to them is when a sales team utilizes it as a leveraging tool.

I’ll close this post up with something else that caught my eye in Aaron’s post above.

“Google has a long history of deceiving webmasters, in order to push Google’s business interests and keep their search results clean.”

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So I’ve ran across another great article by Axandra this morning that I thought I’d share with my readers. However, since this is my second post about one of their articles I will point out that you can sign up to receive their free newsletter yourself if you’d like. Click here.

This week’s article is titled, “Top 6 reasons why your search engine rankings have dropped“.

A lot of my clients could use a healthy understanding as to why rankings go down from time to time. Believe it or not it isn’t always a conspiracy between your fellow competitors and Google hasn’t purposefully with bad intentions decided to pull the plug on your site; not while I’m working on it anyways.

A lot of people I know in the SEO industry could use a little dose of reality too. I see a lot of new faces come and go on forums, social networks and blogs. Most are quick to jump the gun and point fingers at everyone and anyone and not at their own handy work.  I too have been guilty of jumping the gun when I was younger and I always caused myself more grief then was needed. Hopefully by extending this to my readers I’ll save them some grief.

If you are an Internet marketer then you’d benefit greatly from slowing down and learning some basic common sense reasons why sites you manage may have fallen from page one. Several of those reasons have NOTHING to do with the on page optimization you’ve done and trying to fix something without really knowing what’s broken or why it is broken is never a good idea.

I encourage you to read the article but for those of you who are too busy to slow down here are the six reasons without explanation:

1. Your website changes
2. The links to your website change
3. The websites of your competitors change
4. Spam elements on your web pages
5. Search engine algorithm changes
6. Technical problems

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