Pixelrage.net

Years into the game, the page rank mania is hotter than ever on marketing forums across the ‘net. I still don’t know why, but it’s like venereal disease of web marketing that never stops flaring up. When looking at the big picture in web marketing, the goal is to achieve success by presenting something helpful and relevant to whatever audience you’re targeting. In my personal portfolio of websites and storefronts, I measure success by 1) sales (obviously), 2) SERPs and 3) various statistics such as bounce rate and average stay. Others are still hung up on PR…but why?

Revisit page rank, if you will. It’s like some mysterious figure that represents your site on a scale of N/A to 10, 10 being highest and virtually impossible to ever obtain, and N/A being either too new to determine, or banned for whatever reason. Perhaps some humans are overly visual creatures and need a representation of how they’re doing, like getting a gold star on your spelling homework in 3rd grade. To me, the gold star was nice, but all I cared about was the “100″ written in the teacher’s grade book.

Endless debates rage on about how to get a higher page rank. “Should I buy a backlink from a PR6 site? Or just submit to 100 PR0 directories?” How about putting all of that time, money and effort into creating content and building relationships? How about doing so in a field you really grew to like, not one that has worked for someone else?

If you focus your efforts on something that has a higher probability to succeed, you’ll stop worrying about meaningless bullshit like page rank. I still maintain websites that are several years old, getting 600 hits per day and making over $1k a month with PR1. I wouldn’t have even cared to check their page rank if I hadn’t been inspired to write this article and use it as an example!

Don’t let meaningless integers lower your morale. Stop looking at your page rank, it’s like looking down while walking the tight rope. Focus on the only metric that truly matters (beyond making customers happy): your SERPs for whatever keywords you’re targeting!