Website Building biz

Google’s pagerank values are in the process of being updated, and many webmasters are seeing changes in the PR number attached to their sites. Does it matter? Yes and no.

Page rank in and of itself isn’t going to bring in traffic. It is quite possible to have a high PR web page that only ranks for terms that no one searches for. SEO specialists will say again and again: “Only SERPs matter” and its true. But can you really get top SERPs on a site with no pagerank? Probably not.

Basically, pagerank is a value of the links pointing to your website. Search placement is more related to specific anchor text coming from related pages and optimized keywords on page and in URLs, but if all other things are equal, it seems like the higher page rank should win out.

Pagerank is also good for a sense of accomplishment and knowing that you’re heading in the right direction. If your site had a numeric rank one day and it drops to zero the next, you should be aware that something has gone wrong with your SEO strategy and figure out what needs to be fixed ASAP. For me, I saw all my domains tick up a point or two (websitebuilding.biz is now PR 2 after several months of lingering at zero!) so its a helpful reminder that things are on track. Even if they’re slower than I’d like

We all know the “Google dance” is constantly shifting results around a point or two, but is there a bigger SERP update process that creates big jumps on a longer cycle?

I’m used to general, gradual SERP changes, so I wanted to share my recent experience to the contrary and invite everyone else to share their experiences…

About six weeks ago, I was working on a keyword string & common variations with about 10 million competition. I spent about two weeks focusing on it but I couldn’t get to the top100 so I forgot about it and moved along. I completely ignored it for a month and suddenly in the last few days I realized it was suddenly bringing in 100 visits/day from low first page & high second page results.

Now, either Google took a month to find all of the links, or there is some kind of SERP cycle involved. I guess if those are the choices, it might not matter which it is so long as you stay patient. It may even be counter-productive to build links for a target phrase until you’re at the top - you might have already had the lead and entered into the realm of overkill. Of course it will help you stay on top longer, but I think this has been a good reminder for me to stay diversified and work on multiple projects at the same time.

Stay patient, keep at it, and don’t be surprised if the work you do today doesn’t pay off until tomorrow. Results may be subject to delay, but you’ll also be gaining long-term revenue streams.