After each Google PageRank update, bloggers find themselves pondering the value of PageRank in relationship to their blog, and what really made the difference between whether their site got its first PageRank, a huge jump, a deserved increase, an undeserved decrease, or the infamous no information available rank.
While most are concerned about their main site in comparison to others, I found myself curious about the internal PageRank of posts on my site, since my root domain PageRank has remained steady for the last several updates. So I decided to do a little analysis of top content using pageviews, comments, tweets, and other factors in comparison to the PageRank of those posts. Here is a sampling of that analysis, including my own posts from this site, guest author posts on Kikolani, and a post I did for my company website (since I have access to their analytics).
Icon Key
Post Date, 
Lifetime Page Views, 
Average Time Spent on Page, 
Comments, 
Tweets, 
Backlinks (Except From This Domain), 
Delicious Bookmarks, 
PageRank
| Post | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Valuable Comments vs. Comment Spam | 3-2010 | 402 | 5:16 | 40 | 36 | 96 | 0 | 4 |
| Benefits of Duplicate Content | 3-2010 | 157 | 5:04 | 9 | 23 | 41 | 1 | 4 |
| Getting Overwhelmed? Get Organized | 2-2010 | 956 | 4:08 | 27 | 129 | 90 | 15 | 4 |
| Social Media for Non-Profits | 3-2010 | 196 | 3:53 | 16 | 20 | 69 | 1 | 4 |
| Top 10 Ways to Make Your Blog Socialble | 3-2010 | 3,820 | 2:48 | 7 | 94 | 178 | 30 | 4 |
| Reasons to Love CommentLuv Blogs | 1-2010 | 727 | 4:58 | 72 | 27 | 91 | 2 | 3 |
| How I Got 200 Subscribers in One Month | 1-2010 | 488 | 4:12 | 14 | 35 | 14 | 1 | 3 |
| Unlock Your Marketing Genius | 2-2010 | 927 | 3:38 | 25 | 54 | 102 | 8 | 3 |
| WordPress Plugins to Increase Traffic | 1-2010 | 524 | 1:10 | 59 | 26 | 90 | 10 | 3 |
| Link Building Resources | 3-2010 | 3,088 | 5:38 | 35 | 287 | 224 | 87 | 3 |
| Social Networking for Blog Promotion | 2-2009 | 2,914 | 4:28 | 91 | 39 | 1,246 | 21 | 3 |
| Twitter Lingo and Tips | 4-2009 | 4,957 | 4:48 | 48 | 142 | 67 | 37 | 3 |
| New StumbleUpon Features | 10-2009 | 2,475 | 4:58 | 37 | 27 | 50 | 4 | 2 |
| Akismet Spam Filters | 9-2009 | 488 | 4:12 | 47 | 3 | 28 | 1 | 2 |
| Twitter Direct Messages | 12-2009 | 1,416 | 4:52 | 46 | 131 | 128 | 7 | 2 |
| Social Media Browser Bookmarklets | 5-2009 | 524 | 1:10 | 43 | 38 | 51 | 12 | 2 |
Summary
Popularity does not equal PageRank, and neither does age. You can see that posts with the fewest comments and tweets have the highest PageRank, whereas posts with the highest traffic and tweets do not. You can see posts with the most amount of backlinks do not necessarily have the highest PageRank either. Newer posts have higher PageRank than older ones.
What Does It Mean?
What does all of this mean? Simply put, it depends on your goals. Do you want your posts to have the most traffic? The most tweets? The most comments? Then you do not necessarily need to be concerned with PageRank, because I can almost guarantee that the highest burst of traffic, tweets, comments, and bookmarks came before any of these posts gained PageRank, not after.
My personal opinion is not to be focused on PageRank. Instead, focus on creating the kinds of posts that provide the most value to your readers, attracting all of the traffic and social reactions as possible, as those are the factors that truly a blog successful.
Your Thoughts on PageRank
What are your thoughts on PageRank? Did you gain PageRank and feel it was more valuable, or lose PageRank and think less of it? Do you believe that PageRank benefits your blog or harms it?
This post brought to you by Kristi Hines
Kristi Hines is creator of Kikolani which focuses on blogging tips and social networking. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Kristi has written 311 awesome article(s) for Kikolani.
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Great information about how Google PageRank has little to do with post popularity.
Agreed! I would like to know more about the types of backlinks each of these posts had – maybe some are ranked higher because of better backlinks, even though others have a stronger quantity.
Nice job of creating relevant links to past articles by posting the article stats. Particularly interesting to note the lack of correlation to tweets.
Call me a hypocrite, but if my clients’ websites experience an increase in Pagerank, I emphasize that it is an important ranking factor. If their Pagerank is goes down, but their ranking and traffic remains stable, I mention that Google is de-emphazing. It remains an easy metric to utilize in reporting on results.
Hey Kristi,
I agree that PR is not the “silver bullet” when it comes to traffic or popularity of a page/site. I have a site that is PR0 but it gets 5X more traffic than one of my other sites that is PR3. My traffic just recently shot up for the PR0 site, so we’ll see what happens to that Pagerank this month (I was expecting a PR update from Google during the first week of July 2010…??) Anyway, I’ll try to update you on what happens with my PR on the PR0 site. I may end up putting my foot in my mouth regarding the issue of whether pagerank=traffic. We’ll see (=
-John
New from John@Ubscure Article Directory Telemarketing within the Age of the Web
In my small career in Blogging.. I have noticed that there a lot of people who keep worrying about pagerank and do-not concentrate on creating content which people will like to read!
Even i use to do that before, but once I faced a situation that my PageRank decreased but my traffic went up. This gave me real confidence..
New from Rohit Sane Blogging on Wordpress is just a Phone call away-
Pagerank comes from links. I wrote a blog post about common myths after I heard some “SEO expert” say that it comes from valuable content and age and whatnot. Just remember that the only factor which influences pagerank is links; nothing else.
New from Techie Drawbacks of Paid Directories
This is actually very interesting subject. I have thought about it many times. I had noticed once that the most commented and visited internal pages get Page Rank very easy. But there were exceptions, and your article also proves that this is not true. In theory just backlinks should play a role, but I think it is more complicated than that.
And about the new post having high PR, this can be explained with them being on the front page and having a link from the index high PR page.
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