Here’s a good question from a friend:

I’ve read that PR (Page Rank)  is becoming less important these days because of the change in algorithms used by Google and the rest. What’s your take on that?  William Jeansonne, M.B.A.

I’m not so sure about PR becoming less important, don’t really think it was ever all that important to begin with. We are dwelling into what goes on behind closed doors at Google so I can only speculate based on my experiences. Here is an official statement about PR from the Google Webmaster page. 

“When a user enters a search query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the Page Rank for a given page. Page Rank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s Page Rank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.” 

From my experience and Google’s statement, I believe it is safe to assume that PR has little to do with where a page is placed in search results. Certainly PR is not the leading or even close to the top priority for improving SERP. I have seen many times that good SEO with relevant keywords can easily achieve top placement and place higher than sites with a good PR rating. However if there is allot of competition for your keywords or phrases then a good PR is going to be beneficial in beating the competition to the front page of Google. 

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