Every time someone asks about how to improve their website PageRank there is always someone in the audience who says basically forgets about PageRank and concentrates on traffic. While traffic or visitors are usually the end target of a website, is PageRank then not important at all?
Lets have a look at the news from horses mouth
PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
In other word if all pages on the whole web are to do an election except the candidates are also the whole web, the pages that gets the most of the vote gets higher PR. Because PageRank based on link from one page to another it can be concluded that if a visitor navigating the web by clicking on the links only, the highest possibility is that the said visitor will end up at the page with the highest PageRank.
The other factor is pages that cast vote are added in millions everyday and Google recalculates PageRank scores each time it crawls the Web and rebuilds its index. As Google increases the number of pages in its collection, the initial approximation of PageRank decreases for all pages that already indexed. That is why some pages get their PageRank reduced, it does not necessarily mean the particular page is penalized. There are stories about some pages that have its PageRank manually reduced by Google mainly for selling links, this however has never been confirmed as Google as always has kept it trade secret closed.
Why doesn’t PageRank necessarily translate into traffic?
Simple, these day visitors are more likely to use search engine than navigate the web through links and the hierarchy of search engine result page are not only PageRank.
A lot of people confuses PageRank, SERP (Search Engine Result Placement), Traffic and Conversion Rate. Those four are different thing that needs to be worked at individually. PageRank simply shows other pages linking to your page, which means in Google eyes, those page votes for or agree with your page. For some people this may mean squat as money rightly is their main target, for others they may take pride in knowing that their pages are approved by the rest of the World Wide Web community.
How do you detect fake PageRank?
If you see a website and you want to know if their PageRank is real or 302 redirection you can just type info: www.sitename.com on Google search box and if the result are different you can be sure that it is a fake PageRank, the original PageRank is owned by the result website.
Try this for fun info:www.bakery-online.com
How do you increase PageRank?
As explained above, PageRank based on links from other page to your page so you increase your PageRank by increasing those backlinks to your page. It can be forum signature, blog comment or directory listing. Make sure those links are do follow, other wise it wont give you PageRank benefit. Google also recalculate PageRank on certain intervals, so you may have to wait (usually around three months) to have your backlinks caounted.
For more in-depth reading go to PageRank by Wiki and PageRank explained by Webworkshop
Getting PageRank through this comment