People are very confused about Pagerank. At one end of the scale there are those who believe it's worthless, at the other there are those who believe it's of significant value. So who's right?

First off let's look at how you secure Pagerank. When someone links to a page on your site it's considered to be a vote for it, a thumbs up. It's one of the key metrics Google's systems use to decide the importance of a page. ONE of the key metrics. If many other pages link to your page they are giving Google a signal that your page is important. If the pages linking to your page also have links to them and they are considered to be important pages, their link to you is given even more value. This is why some people suggest it's not worth getting a link from a page unless the page you want the link from has itself got a decent pagerank - this is misguided.

With me so far?

The history behind this relates to the Google boys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, being academics. In academia peer reviewed papers are the common currency of 'status'. If you write a paper and your peers review and applaud it you are off to a good start. If your paper is then referenced by other people's papers it's stature and kudos goes up further, as does yours as the author.

So, suggesting Pagerank is worthless is actually untrue, it may not generate a ton of lucrative traffic, but it does have a value.

So why is it not the be all and end all of a web page? Simple, relevancy.

Google needs to deliver relevant results to people searching. If they don't people will go elsewhere for their search needs. It doesn't simply look for the page with the highest Pagerank to put at number one, it looks for a page that is most relevant. This is why a Pagerank 3 page can be at number 1 with a Pagerank 6 being at number 10.

How Google decides on relevancy is complex and they don't share the formula with the outside world! The stuff we know is used includes various on page 'tags' such as Title, H1 etc, and the relevancy of links.

So, an example - Suppose you have a page on your site and it has 100 links to it. These links are from pages that themselves have links and as such a decent Pagerank. These links give your page a Pagerank of say 4. However, although the pages linking to your page have a good Pagerank they are not exactly relevant to your page. That is to say your page could be about ships but the pages linking to you are about birds, mountains and needlework. These links are giving your page a good Pagerank but they are not relevant to your page.

So along comes a person searching and they type 'ships' into Google. Your page, with its Pagerank of 4 is at number 8 but the page at number one only has a Pagerank of three! How come?

The page at number one most likely doesn't have as many links as you, or at least as many quality links - links from pages that themselves have links. However, the links the page at number one does have are all from sites about ships. So, other pages about ships are linking to this page which is about ships. That's (probably) why it's beating your Pagerank 4 page even though it's only Pagerank 3, and that's why people think Pagerank has no value. "How can Pagerank have any value if a page with Pagerank 3 beats a page with Pagerank 6?". You now understand why, relevancy.

What this all means is simple. If you have a high Pagerank because you've been busy securing lots of irrelevant links you are not going to see much benefit from it. If however you have a high Pagerank from securing highly relevant links you will see a benefit from it. This is why sometimes the number one page is a high Pagerank and sometimes it isn't.

Getting a good rank in Google for a competitive phrase is hard work. In this context you shouldn't concern yourself with pagerank. If however you can secure high quality relevant links to your page you will see your pagerank AND traffic increase.