People who are new to the field of Search Engine Optimization are concerned if the Google PageRank affects Search Engine Result Page (SERP). In order to find the answer back in 2009 I did some research and found some interesting articles to improve the PR of my website offering Vancouver Web Design Services.
I mostly followed the tips from Griz’s SEO articles at makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com. One of his articles mentioned that a website mostly needs back links or inbound links for improving the PageRank.
I started to learn the tricks for finding high PR websites that are relevant to a particular niche and did some link building for Sparta Web Solutions in the second quarter of 2012. I was eager to see the results and was seeing improvements in Alexa ranking but didn’t see any change in the Google page rank. So, one day I searched for page rank estimation and found this interesting site that does google page rank prediction for a website. The estimated page rank for my website was 3 whereas the actual rank was ‘Zero’.
In the following Google PR update around May-June 2012 my Website for Vancouver Web Design Services went from PR0 to PR 3 last year with a little SEO work before the expected PR update. The interesting fact is that my website didn’t have much content still it jumped from PR0 to PR 3. The domain PR has stayed there for the last nine months because I haven’t done any link building work during that period. But I notice that with every PR update Google assigns PR1 or PR2 to the internal pages. I have started SEO work again for my main website and some other websites and after two months of link building works the page rank predictor at http://3w1.eu/predicted-pagerank/ and is showing higher estimated PR for all the experimental projects.
I will be posting the status after the next Google PR update which may be starting around the last week of June 2013.
Here is the Google PR (page rank) update schedule for 2013:
- 1st Update may me on January 28 to February 6
- 2nd update may be on June 27 to July 7
- 3rd Update may be on September 29 to October 4
- 4th Update may be on 24 December to December 29
So Page Rank affects ranking in SERPS?
Technically speaking, PageRank is a general level of strength based on the quantity and strength of inbound links to a page. When talking about SERP, Google has stated that they make use of more than 200 ranking factors. Back in 2009 most webmasters were only focusing on getting tons of backlinks for higher SERP ranking and a site even with irrelevant content could appear in the top 10 search results. Google and other search engine are busy in developing robust ranking algorithms based on language relevancy. But, we can’t assume that PageRank is completely dead. 200+ ranking factors minus all factors of language based relevancy equals PageRank.
In the future, as Google’s algorithms evolve, as they become more and more complex and trend toward a greater percentage of language based relevancy factors, PageRank’s influence may be diminished. So the key point is to focus on writing quality content in your niche in addition to the link building efforts.
According to my own experiments, getting the higher PageRank alone influenced the SERP ranking slightly. When I started focusing on quality content and on-page optimization, I saw real improvement in SERP ranking for my website.