How Did I Get a PR of 3???

[Aminka Ozmun]

Okay, Smart People -- please clue me in!!

I have this add-on/plug-in/whachamacallit in Chrome called "Page Rank." It was recommended to me as being highly accurate, whatever, so I installed it.

I don't usually follow these things, but today I did notice that my brand-new site, WordPress Shopping Cart Reviews, got a PR of 3!!!

This is a site with absolutely no content (a Pavlina mod even banned me from linking it after someone complained about it in my .sig )...it's just a coming-soon/placeholder page right now. So how in heaven's name have I achieved a PR of 3 already????

I'm theorizing that perhaps the domain name has some linkjuice or whatever it's called due to its Google history, being that it may have been previously owned???? But I don't recall ever starting out with any PR, though -- at least not according to this Page Rank thinggy in Chrome.

My other eye-opener is my own eponymous site, Aminka Ozmun, for which the thinggy doesn't show any calculation at all -- I don't mean just the zero I had previously in Page Rank, but that there's no calculation at all now!

What's up with that?!?!


Many thanks for all ideas....

[SnerpGoodWord]

Task bar page rank calculations have been inaccurate or missing for a long time now. They have nothing whatsoever to do with how google actually ranks pages for search, so it's probably best to just forget about them.

[Aminka Ozmun]

Originally Posted by SnerpGoodWord

Task bar page rank calculations have been inaccurate or missing for a long time now. They have nothing whatsoever to do with how google actually ranks pages for search, so it's probably best to just forget about them.

And then there's always the possibility that it's all broken! Though I have to say that other rankings, of my other sites and those I don't own, seem accurate enough still....

Anyway, thanks for the reminder, SnerpGoodWord. I did notice recently that for one day, one of my sites was ranked number one for its (very very very non-competitive) keyword! I guess it's ye olde Google algorithm update....

[Curtis2011]

I once set up a site that had almost no links coming to it at all, and it got up to pagerank of 3 on the home page within like 6 weeks of going online.

That is opposed to my acupuncture site which has more content and has been around longer, and definitely has more links to it, which has a PR of only 1 on the home page.

So I would say... just don't worry about it. Pagerank often doesn't make sense.

I honestly have totally stopped checking pagerank for anything, and also stopping checking Alexa rankings for anything. Both are totally worthless stats, unless you are using them to try to sell your site to someone and thus prove your site's worth (even though if other people were smart, they wouldn't care about those stats either).

Much more important is simply how much traffic you are getting. That is really the stat that matters the most.

[GregD]

Actually i went to your site and it is PR 3, it is not broken. It can however be changed on the next PR update. Nobody has an exact timing but i heard PR gets updated every 3 months. Here we are talking about the outdated PR that is available to the public which Google releases over time. Google themselves use a realtime PR which nobody has access to.

Then, your site is actually not 1 page, but there are 112 pages indexed by Google belonging to your site, so you don't even know what's going on with your site.

Go to google and search this:
site:<your site>
and you will see 112 results

This also means that all those 112 pages probably have various backlinks coming to them and the consolidation of all of that results in the current PR 3.

I also do not agree with the comment above about the acupuncture site. An in-depth investigation will always be able to explain why the PRs may be different, however, I do agree that there is no point doing this as it is not important.

What is important?
The traffic you receive. That's all.
Once you have traffic you have many options on what to do with it.

[chadcharlie]

I agree with both replies above me.
I have one business site that is a strong PR3 with backlinks from DMOZ, among others, and the traffic is less than 50 a day because we spend most of our time pitching in the street and not online, for that business. Matter of fact, everything attached to that site is PR3 or higher. The FB fan page, the YouTube page, and some other pages we use frequently.

I'm working with another niche blog and she ranked PR3 in less than 11 months...I was pretty proud of her, but her traffic is barely 100 a day. (Good content though!)

My most recent site is new so it has no PR, but the traffic is a strong 100 to 300 a day from Reddit and SU alone, when I'm plugging articles. I'm working on a systematized backlinking strategy with this one, using article distribution and other web layers, so I really care more about the traffic than the PR. However, having access to all these PR3 sites should rank the new one pretty quick.

I assume the PR will catch up, but also know first hand that higher PR doesn't necessarily equate higher traffic. If that were true, there would be a lot of .edu sites blowing traffic out the water!

Take care,
Chad.

[Aminka Ozmun]

Thanks for the heads-ups, Curtis2011, GregD, and chadcharlie! Really learned a lot, and I'm very grateful for that.

Yes, traffic is all-important. But it's affected by factors such as SERP ranking, and I was given to understand that page rank (which isn't SERP ranking, I know) had some role to play in that. So when I saw my PR at 3 all of a sudden, I was just really puzzled!

Well, that PR is still at 3, even if it's just a statistical anomaly! Interestingly, Google itself today went down a notch, from 10 to 9!!