Does PR have any real relation to a site popularty

[NealRM]

I maybe branded as a heritic and burned at the stake. But how improtant is a PR number? It appears that the number is based on everything but how many people visit your site. I understand that placing well in a search engine will bring some traffic to your site, but I'm not convinced that sending the extra work on site content and promotion would not yield better results.

I'm interested if there is a relation between PR and site popularity. Is anyone will to share thier PR numbers and hit counts?

[OHMwebmaster]

I'm a little confused by your question, but maybe a general answer about Page Rank will help?

PageRank is determined by the amount of links pointing to your website. It doesn't matter if you get 10 visitors a day, or 10,000 - the actual amount of traffic you get does not raise or lower your PageRank.

Instead, as you suggested, it sort of works the other way. If you manage to raise your PageRank (meaning that you've gotten a lot of other websites to link to you) then your traffic will most likely start to increase due to better rankings in the search engines.

But, if you somehow had a site with a PR of 8 and only one page, you probably wouldn't get very much traffic because you don't have much content.

Google not only looks at PR when sending searches, but also at what kind of words and content you have across your whole website in general, and individual pages specifically.

Adding extra pages and lots of text-heavy content will help bring in more traffic, even if your PageRank is still low. Essentially you're covering more words that people might search for.

And the nice thing is, over time as you do that, you'll probably find your PageRank increasing, because people will naturally link to your content.

Hope this helps.

[NealRM]

Hi Dan,

It doesn't matter if you get 10 visitors a day, or 10,000 - the actual amount of traffic you get does not raise or lower your PageRank.

This is exactly the point of the first part of the thread. That PageRank does not rank how interested people are in your site, just how successful the webmaster is at getting others to link to his site.

The second portion is a general question, is the effort needed to raise a site's PR well spent or would that effort be better used to increase a sites user interest?

[OHMwebmaster]

Sorry, Neal, I guess I wasn't clear.

In my opinion, it's best to focus on increasing user interest. Why? Because that will lead to natural PageRank growth.

Getting links without having good content won't help anyone.

[doogers]

But it is good to get links either way, you could still get a lead here or there even if you have a bad website.

[36towns]

Higher PR websites tend to rank better in Google, therefore receive more traffic and visitors from Google.

[Jason Painter]

PR is just one factor on many when deciding search engine results placement. But it does help.

[langard]

This has been discussed in a thousand threads in other webmaster forums at length. JimWorld ( searchengineforums.com ), WebProWord and others.

Google and Matt Cutts both unilaterally confirm that PageRank is just one of a hundred discriminating points that Google uses to evaluate sites. Because of link-farming, it has lost what little value it originally may have held.

In short, the consensus is forget about PageRank altogether. Don't spend any time chasing it. Concentrate on high quality content and rich, topic-related IBLs. PageRank has nearly nothing to do with the RI (organic) or SI (supplimental) positioning of your pages in the results.

Just let it go.

Postscript:
To be sure, I have thousands of pages with 'zero' PageRank sitting firmly in the top ten results on Google for hundreds of different keyword combinations. I also have a few pages on sites with a PageRank of 8 that don't show up in the top 400 results. Which would you rather have?

[Overseas]

Langard - Correct, correct - i have a pr7 site, and many lower and zero page ranked sites are above me for certain keywords.

36 towns - hey don't worry about page rank, honestly i lost interest in it years ago ... worry about quality keyword content and a few quality backlinks - you're site / page can easily beat the top listers, easily with quality content.

[JimOlenbush]

and... we don't even get to see the real page rank. just a snapshot of few months back.

I think of it more as just a sign that google knows about this page and crawls it for sure, if it shows zero then it may still be "known" and crawled, but it warrants a closer look at the cache and links pointing to that page. It is just one of many pieces of the puzzle.