What the F are you doing on the “PR doesn’t matter bandwagon”?

A while ago I started seeing comments and threads showing up on forums and blogs about how much PageRank (PR) doesn’t matter; I’m sure you’ve see them too. Forget about the fact that a high PR opens up a whole new world of opportunities as far as link exchanges and link sales (if that’s your thing). Let’s just talk about whether or not PR helps influence search engine rankings. I’ll admit that for a minute or three I was questioning if PR really did matter. I mean, there are tons of websites that rank well for keywords even though they don’t have high PR, but how competitive are those keywords?

Are these people honestly suggesting that PR has absolutely NO effect on Google rankings? Are they trying to convince me that Google’s algorithm puts absolutely NO weight on PageRank? Are they seriously telling me that the Googler spends time and money on a big joke? Are they telling me that they believe a link from a PR1 page is equal to a link from a PR9 page? Are they stupid, do they just not think before they post, or both?

This was supposed to be a short rant so I’m not going to bore you with the many reasons why I think PR is very important to the overall success of your site’s rankings in Google. I am going to give you just 1 reason that should be enough to get your ace off the “PR doesn’t matter bandwagon”.

If you answered yes to any of the above questions then you must also believe that some factors of your website’s internal link structure don’t matter? I mean, if you have a link to a popular section from your home page, aside from the traffic, it wouldn’t matter if you took that link off and moved it to a back page with no PR, right? After all, your website’s PR doesn’t matter so why worry about putting less links on your homepage? Why worry about adding the “nofollow” attribute to some links so that you can increase the PR juice that each link can pass? Screw it, since none of that shiv matters why not add a ton of links and just sprinkle them all over the f’ing place? I got an idea! Let’s make your homepage a damn directory for every one of your 3,000 pages. That’ll show em that PR doesn’t matter.

PR does matter – period. If a website ranks well for a keyword and the website has a low PR, it’s probably because it’s an old domain, the links to that website for the keyword are aged, the website is more aggressive than competitors for a keyword, the website has better onsite optimization, or a combination of these. If I have a PR0 website with 1000 links for the keyword “Blue Hats” and my competitor has a PR5 website and 10 links for the keyword “Blue Hats”, assuming my content is decent and the links have equal PR and relevancy, I’ll outrank my competitor.

If your website’s homepage has a high PR and your websites internal pages have a high PR then you have the ability to actually control every aspect of high PR links to different pages on your site! You can add links to pages, remove links from pages and change anchor text as often as you like. How sweet is that?