What Is Page Rank: Google Page Rank Finally Explained

Everyone seems to think that Page Rank is the be all and end all of SEO. I seriously get sick of talking about Page Rank because people argue with my opinion. My opinion is that Page Rank barely has a correlation with good search engine rankings. Here are some of my opinions:

• You don’t need a higher Page Rank than your competitors to outrank them.
• You don’t need backlinks from solely high Page Rank websites.
• Zero Page Rank backlinks work very well.
• Page Rank is one of the least important aspects to SEO.

If you’re doing SEO to generate traffic, you shouldn’t really give a crap about your site’s Page Rank. No matter what anyone says, you can’t deny the fact that a low Page Rank site can outrank a high Page Rank site.

It goes back to what I’ve previously said about on-page SEO and how limited it is. Page Rank can be thought of as an on-page SEO factor. The goal of this post wasn’t to say Page Rank is useless, because Page Rank plays an important role in search engine optimization. For both link building and ranking.

For some reason people think Page Rank is the combined value of a page’s total backlinks when really, it’s not. According to the guys at Google, the higher a site’s Page Rank, the more often it’s crawled by the spiders.

And we all know what the Google spiders do when they crawl a site, right? They check around for new pages, and when they find them, they index or simply update them. So by having a higher Page Rank, your pages will be indexed much faster than other websites.

With that being said, Google usually indexes sites in a matter of minutes or hours. So that benefit is pretty useless. The biggest benefit is authority. If I had to directly translate the word Page Rank into another word; it would be authority.

Generally the more incoming links a site has, the older it is and the more pages it has, the higher its Page Rank. As your Page Rank increases, it allows you to rank faster in the search engines.

It also allows you to outrank other sites faster; it just means you have authority. And authority, as we all know, allows us to rank faster, higher up, and like a rock in the search engines.

New sites can rank just as quickly as high Page Rank sites. They can even outrank them with better on-page SEO; but they don’t have the same “sticking” characteristic high PR sites tend to have.

The truth is no one really knows the Google Page Rank formula. Nobody knows how Google gives out Page Rank. In fact, nobody really knows how Google evaluates websites, not exactly anyway.

However, we do know that the more backlinks your site has, the higher its Page Rank will climb. And… The higher the Page Rank of the backlinks, the more PR juice they transfer through to your website.

And… Page Rank flows through all links, internal and external.

So what the heck is Page Rank?

Well, I like to think of it as a natural resource of the Internet. Sort of like oil. To quickly understand it, think of Page Rank as this juice that flows through all links on the Internet. Another key concept to remember: Google gives every page on the Internet a Page Rank value.

Page Rank goes up to 10, 10 being the best and 0 being the worst. Few sites in the world have Page Rank 7, 8, 9, and 10. In fact, only Google and a few other sites have a Page Rank of 10. PR’s 8, 9, and 10 are rare PERIOD.

However, Page Rank 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, 4’s, 5’s, and 6’s get around. Page Rank 6 and 7 sites are actually quite rare. PR 1’s to 5’s are pretty normal. Page Rank passes through all links internally and externally.

So if you get a link from a PR7 page, that does not mean you’re going to get a Page Rank of 4, 5, 6, or 7. Link juice is lost when it moves from one page to another. Also, a page’s PR is distributed through all of its internal and external links.

And… The chances are if you do get a link from a PR7 page, you’re probably not the only one getting a link. There may well be 15 other external and 6 internal links. So the PR7 page would have already lost the majority of its “passable Page Rank” through the 21 links.

The fewer outbound links, the better, but you’re rarely going to get high PR backlinks from pages with low OBL’s. To be honest, I wouldn’t worry too much about Page Rank. SEO is complicated enough; you should always keep things simple.

Just know that Page Rank isn’t the most important element to successful SEO. As long as you build a variety of backlinks, you’ll rank well in the search engines.

>>> Click Here To Read More About Page Rank And How To Increase It <<<

Ashley M.

I completely agree with everything you’ve said in this post! I’ve been trying to improve my website’s Page Rank for a while, but your insights have helped me understand that focusing solely on Page Rank is not the way to go. Your point about backlinks from lower PR sites being effective was a game changer for me. Thank you for sharing your expertise!

Chris R.

I’m a bit skeptical about some of the claims here, especially about the idea that Page Rank is not important for SEO. Could you provide any case studies or data to back this up? I’ve always been under the impression that high Page Rank sites consistently outrank lower PR sites. If there’s any evidence supporting your view, I’d be really interested in seeing it.

Jordan S.

Thanks for the post! I have a question: how do you think Page Rank impacts niche websites? I run a small blog and sometimes wonder if I should even bother with Page Rank at all. Do you think focusing on other SEO factors like content quality and backlinks would be a better approach for a smaller site like mine?

Melissa K.

While I appreciate your perspective, I have to disagree on some points. Page Rank might not be the only factor in SEO, but from my experience, it still plays a significant role in getting noticed by search engines. I think this post downplays its importance a bit too much, and it might lead people to ignore it altogether, which could hurt their rankings.

Ben G.

Hey David! It’s been a while since we last talked. This post brought back memories of our long discussions about SEO back in the day. I love how you’re still sharing great insights with everyone. Let’s catch up sometime soon—maybe grab coffee and talk more about how the SEO landscape is evolving. Looking forward to it!

Sarah J.

This post reminded me of a problem I had with one of my websites. I was fixated on increasing my Page Rank but didn’t see any real improvement in traffic. It wasn’t until I focused more on content quality and natural link-building that I saw a real boost in rankings. Your post really hits home for me—thanks for the validation!

Tom L.

Great post! I’ve been using a tool called Moz that helps analyze backlink profiles, and it’s been really helpful for improving my SEO strategies. It doesn’t focus solely on Page Rank, but gives you a more comprehensive picture of your site’s SEO health. I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking for alternative tools to focus on more than just Page Rank.

Lindsey P.

I just wanted to say thank you for this insightful post. I’ve been trying to learn more about SEO, and this post clarified so many things for me. I used to obsess over my site’s Page Rank, but now I realize that building good content and strong backlinks is what really matters. Thanks for teaching me something new today!