Google PageRank Says GoDaddy.com is Irrelevant and Unimportant

• May 28 -
• Marketing

from bharathreddypunuru

Whether you know it or not, some of your customers are quickly evaluating the trustworthiness of your website and your company (compared to your competitors) based on Google’s PageRank (PR) – the zero to 10 ranking scale Google applies to all web pages. In the absence of other criteria, it’s actually an easy way for consumers to compare apples to apples. They use PR to determine at a glance how much Google trusts your website, and by extension, how much they should trust your website. The only problem is it’s an imperfect ranking system. Your competitors can fake a high PR, and likewise you could be the unknowing victim of a lower PR. The latter actually happened to GoDaddy.com recently – it looks like they were downgraded from PR7 to PR2 overnight. It’s a fluke (see blow), but if it can happen to them, it can happen to you.

There are other reasons to be aware of PageRank’s imperfect scale. Not least of which is if you are paying some freelancer to do link building or search engine optimization (SEO) for your business website. If you or your service provider don’t know how to identify a website’s true trustworthiness, you could be spending time (or money) acquiring links from the wrong sites. Sneaky website owners can actually fake high PR for the purpose of making their websites look more popular than they are.

I honestly don’t know if the fake PR loophole still works – I’ve never tried it. But you can bet other people are trying it every day. Notice how many of the commenters in the article I linked above are asking the author how they can fake high PR for their own sites. It’s an unfortunate reminder how many people are out there will do whatever they can to fake their way to the top.

SEO aside, however, it pays to know your website’s PR if only because your customers may be using it as a trust indicator for your business. More to the point of this post, if your PR appears to drop like GoDaddy’s did, it’s good to know if you can fix it (often there’s no easy fix, but in GoDaddy’s case, there is). Google appears to have dropped GoDaddy’s PageRank from 7 to 2 – that is a massive swing in the wrong direction. And as of the writing of this post, the issue hasn’t been resolved…but it GoDaddy’s case there’s a solution.

Let’s be honest – GoDaddy probably doesn’t care much about their PageRank…theirs is virtually a household name, and nobody is going to think that because their PR dropped to 2 that the site is now irrelevant. But if this can happen to GoDaddy, it can happen to you. The reason GoDaddy’s PR dropped is simply because they changed their homepage address from godaddy.com to godaddy.com/default.aspx. So, what appears to be a downgrade to PR2 is really just Google’s rank of the new homepage address. If GoDaddy removed /default.aspx from their homepage address, the issue would probably be resolved immediately.

The Good News: PageRank is Only Part of the Picture

The vast majority of the time the Google Toolbar will display a website’s correct PageRank…it’s pretty reliable. But it’s still just one metric. If you really want to get a good idea of where you or your competitors’ sites stand, check some other benchmarks as well. None of them are perfect, but collectively they paint a much more accurate picture than any one ranking alone. Here’s one more reliable way to measure the trustworthiness of a site:

• Check Google PageRank
• Check incoming links: Yahoo Site Explorer (example)
• Check traffic rank:
  • Alexa Rank (example)
  • Ranking.com (example)
  • Quantcast.com (example) (more sites like this)

It’s kind of like the stock market…you can’t just look at stock price to determine the value of a stock. You need to look at P/E, market cap, and other stocks in the same industry. A collection of metrics are needed to see the whole picture.

Even if you’re not interested in competitive research, it makes sense to keep track of your website’s PageRank. Your customers are checking it – you should, too.