Does Pagerank Increase Traffic?
A scan of my Google Analytics reports shows the title question in the logs. Both the Google and Yahoo search engines have a PR (PageRank) designation. It's possible MSN does as well, but I honestly don't know. So does PageRank increase traffic?
The short answer is: not necessarily. The more detailed answer is as follows. What a high PR does do is give those pages higher visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If many people are searching for a term that your page(s) has, your PR will likely increase. But if that term ceases to be popular, a high PR won't make a difference. In fact, it's been stated under such a scenario, your high PR will drop.
Let's take a concrete example. One of my articles at EzineArticles.com has a Google PR of 6. After only about 2 weeks on that site, a Google search for the non-exact phrase high-protein vegetarian places the article in 5th place out of 1,480,000 results.
But this article is a slight revision of an older blog post. The original page has the same title and a Google PR of 0. The blog's main page has a PR of 3. I didn't track this page since it's first publication, but I'm making an educated guess that it has had very little traffic in comparison to the EzineArticles.com version.
What's more telling is that my four cooking blogs, whose main pages have a Google PR of between 3-5, get more traffic each than my newer CurryElvis.com, which still has a PR of 0, at the time of writing. Similarly, my older BlogSpinner blog (PR 5) still gets more traffic than this newer version (PR 0), even though they both have about the same number of articles, and even though the older blog has not had any new posts in quite some time.
So to answer the title question: I'm pretty sure that a high PR has a positive effect on traffic.
(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, pagerank, web traffic
The short answer is: not necessarily. The more detailed answer is as follows. What a high PR does do is give those pages higher visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If many people are searching for a term that your page(s) has, your PR will likely increase. But if that term ceases to be popular, a high PR won't make a difference. In fact, it's been stated under such a scenario, your high PR will drop.
Let's take a concrete example. One of my articles at EzineArticles.com has a Google PR of 6. After only about 2 weeks on that site, a Google search for the non-exact phrase high-protein vegetarian places the article in 5th place out of 1,480,000 results.
But this article is a slight revision of an older blog post. The original page has the same title and a Google PR of 0. The blog's main page has a PR of 3. I didn't track this page since it's first publication, but I'm making an educated guess that it has had very little traffic in comparison to the EzineArticles.com version.
What's more telling is that my four cooking blogs, whose main pages have a Google PR of between 3-5, get more traffic each than my newer CurryElvis.com, which still has a PR of 0, at the time of writing. Similarly, my older BlogSpinner blog (PR 5) still gets more traffic than this newer version (PR 0), even though they both have about the same number of articles, and even though the older blog has not had any new posts in quite some time.
So to answer the title question: I'm pretty sure that a high PR has a positive effect on traffic.
(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, pagerank, web traffic
