PR and Traffic Building

by Sapphire (March 20, 2005)

For those who don’t know, Google assigns websites PageRank, or PR. Your PR is supposed to give an idea how many sites are linking to you, and take into account the quality of those links. Which should tell you how popular your site is. And popularity determines ranking.

But PR is not the only factor Google considers, and I think because PR is an actual Google invention, we tend to get confused and think it is. You do want to have good PR, no doubt about it. But don’t focus your whole strategy on it. A nice article from Test-Tube-Traffic shows how a lower PR site can outperform a higher one.

So what should you focus on? Building links that will bring visitors. It’s a Zen approach - ignore the SE’s altogether, and you’ll rank higher. Am I crazy? Imagine there are no SE’s, and the only way to get traffic is via links:

You would pursue getting links from sites you know are being seen, if you knew which ones are being seen.
You wouldn’t waste your time pursuing links on sites that aren’t getting seen, if you could tell which ones weren’t.
You wouldn’t give a reciprocal link to a site that might lower your credibility in your own visitors’ eyes.

This is how I used to approach link building, back before Google was even strong, back when things were quite different… back when I launched a rather useless site on an esoteric topic and had around 400 unique visitors a month by no other strategy than this.

Now, compare that with how Google’s are trying to make search results happen:

You would pursue getting links from sites with high PR.
You wouldn’t waste your time pursuing links on sites with low PR.
You wouldn’t give a reciprocal link to a site with no PR.

So, in theory, that’s the formula you want to follow. The PR is meant to show you whether the site is performing or not, whether it’s kosher by Google standards are not. This is info that was difficult to gauge a few years ago, and Google’s giving it to you for free. Think of PR as a tool for you to use in your own link building, NOT as the point OF link-building.

Does that make any sense?