Since the moment of its introduction, Google PageRank has been fascinating the minds of SEO specialists and website owners. Measured on a scale of 0 to 10, easy to read and comprehend, it still remains one of the most sought-after properties of a website. But the question is, does Google PageRank really reflect the SEO success of you WebSite, or is it just being overrated? Here are some things to remember, while relying on Google PageRank value.

Google PageRank is a patented algorithm, used by Google to evaluate relative importance of different webpages, based on the number of their links to other pages on the World Wide Web. The algorithm was named after Larry Page, one of its developers, thus the name - PageRank. The idea was to make Google Search Engine results more accurate, by taking into account "connections" of websites. In a word, the more links pointing to your website there are, the more "popular" it appears to Google.

Yet the number of links leading to your website is not the only thing Google PageRank takes into account. It is also important what pages these links come from. To Google, links are like votes that websites cast in order to vouch for other websites. It’s like saying "oh, I know that guy, he’s really great, reliable, and worth dealing with". So, these votes are not of equal value. The vote of a website that has lots of backlinks is of a greater value than the vote of a website nobody links to.

Now, it might be logical to conclude, that the more backlinks a website has, the better it would be to get a link from it. Technically it’s true, but there is one more thing to consider. The importance of a link is proportional to the number of backlinks on the website it comes from. But besides backlinks, such website may have links pointing to other websites, that is, outbound links. So, the more outbound links it has, the less value these links bring to the websites they are going to. It’s like cutting a pie into pieces and sharing it with your friends. The more friends there are, the smaller the pieces. So, while seeking to get connected to a website, also consider how many outbound links it has.

Again, some folks fear that by linking to other websites one decreases the link value of their own site. In other words that the so-called Google PageRank leak takes place. In fact, there’s no such thing. The number of links to other websites does not affect your site’s PageRank. Perhaps, just in the slightest degree that’s nothing to worry about. So, the principle "the more you give, the more you get" does apply here. Also, if Google decides that some of your activities do not look natural (like spamming, harvesting links at link farms), your Google PageRank may become lower.

So, based on "who knows whom", Google gives each page a rank, from 0 to 10, as was said earlier. To view the rank, you need to install the Google Toolbar for your web browser. It’s easily available on-line and is free to install. In the toolbar, move your mouse over the little green scale to see the PageRank of the current page. Some people think that PageRank from 7 to 10 is the only one worth going for. But, actually, SEO experts believe that an average website can be doing incredibly well with PageRank 4 or 5. Besides, even PageRank 4 is tremendously hard to achieve!

Now, how important is it for your website to have a high Google PageRank ? As was mentioned before, some tend to overestimate its significance. In fact, there is no substantial connection between a high PageRank and high Google search engine rankings. Google developers themselves say, that PageRank is one of 200 (!) variables Google takes into account, while establishing website’s relevancy for a particular keyword. And, after all, what makes your website commercially successful is not Google PageRank, but its top position on Google search results page.

Besides, there are other substantial shortcomings that make PageRank NOT a reliable indicator of your website’s progress:

• Infrequent updates. Google may change your PageRank every day, since its values evolve very fast. But it doesn’t mean you are going to immediately find out that your PageRank changed. About the only way for you to check your PageRank is to look it up on Google Toolbar. But, since Google doesn’t send updates to its toolbar very often (in fact about twice a year), what you are likely to see there is some outdated information.

• Limited sphere of application. Google PageRank value is used by Google only. To other search engine, besides Google, it doesn’t really say anything. Thus, the universal nature of Google PageRank is by far an exaggeration.

• Irrelevant for Google local search results. Since Google Places feature was introduced to Google, PageRank seems to be from little to no importance for local search results. So, if your business is bound to a certain area, and clients are likely to search by location, you don’t really need a high PageRank.

• Imprecise scale. PageRank is measured on a scale of whole numbers from 0 to 10. Since only whole numbers are used, that makes Google PageRank quite inaccurate. Two web pages with different ranks may be not that different, or very different, but one will never know, because there is no data that’s more exact.

All right, so now, after considering some of Google PageRank drawbacks, let’s see in what way it can be useful for your SEO. First of all, it can give you a general idea about how well your site is doing in terms of link-building. Secondly, if you are looking for websites to connect to, you can check their Google PageRanks to see which links will be more valuable.

But, all in all, it wouldn’t be right to rely on Google PageRank as a universal marker of your SEO success. Since its correlation to top results page positions is unclear and might not be at all significant. At the same time, too many points speak against such correlation. Then what does Google PageRank really show? It shows a relative value of your site, based on quality and quantity of its links. Yet it doesn’t guarantee high search engine rankings, nor does it really show how well your site is optimized in general.

Besides, there are other metrics that are better correlated with search engine results, and they can be used as an alternative.