Why I’ll be taking GooglePage Rank off my toolbar

You kind of new that at some point someone over at Google was going to do something a little silly and wipe all the good marketing that they’ve done over time into the dust bin. Ok, ok that is a wild exaggeration, but news broke recently when sites saw changes in their page rank, about how Google had started to penalise some sites for buying and selling paid links.

Whilst the searchenginejournal got on their high horse about this straight away, they do make some valid points:

If Google are going to keep changing pagerank of a website, why should I use this as a measure of how good my site is?

Firstly, it doesn’t reflect how much traffic a website is going to get from Google. PageRank, as we keep being told is only a minor part of why a website will rank for a search term.

Secondly, half the pages on my site don’t have a PageRank anyway – they are just too far removed from the home page to pick up any of the ‘juice’. All these page get traffic from search engines (usually far more than the home page). If PageRank were to actually mean anything, surely they wouldn’t get any.

I think I am slowly starting to form a similar opinion to Jim Newsome, that maybe Google should have sent out some warnings to those sites before doing creating the drop, I’m actually going to do a bit more a shoulder shrug on this one. Our PR has fallen. Who cares?

Lets measure our Search Engine Optimisation work in a completely different way:

What do we want our SEO to do? We want it to send more people to our website.

How do we measure this? Lets count how much traffic it has sent to our website using our web analytics tool.

Has our SEO work been a success? Well lets look to see whether our search engine referred traffic is going up or down. More importantly lets do it in 2 ways:

Firstly – lets measure how many visits search engines have created, then lets use this as a comparison to the total traffic to the site.

Secondly – lets measure how much money this traffic has made us (through either conversions or if your website doesn’t sell anything then you’ll need to have page impression generated).

Then, and this is the most important step, measure this over time. Trending is the most important thing you can do.

Hey – lets delve deeper in. Take out your brand terms if you rank number one for them (they are the easy terms). Segment by search engine. Segment by search term. Start doing the analysis of which terms you are missing. But all this still needs to be trended.