A little extra pagerank seems to bring a lot of traffic
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Whether Google’s pagerank is the cause or the result of a popular website is a topic of much debate, and while there are many theories as to the who/what/why/where/when of Google, cold hard facts are in short supply. My recent increase to page 3 and accompanying change in traffic has certainly left me wondering.
For the sake of this article lets just say traffic includes gaining backlinks, social networking and all the normal SEO, so I don’t have to repeat myself.
Many will tell you that you should work towards gaining a high pagerank which will in turn yield high traffic. Just as many will tell you that pagerank is just a reflection of your traffic and is the result of a popular site, not the reason for one.
While the latter certainly sounds more reasonable and is the theory I subscribe to, my own experience suggest otherwise. Above you will see my Google Analytics traffic for the last 7 or so months, and my jump to pagerank 3 in mid September.
The first 5 or so months of blogging on my new domain name ( at pagerank 0 ) were fairly unexciting as you can imagine. Averaged out, unique visits began at around 40 a day for the first month and made there way up to 400 or so by the 5th.
With the September pagerank update however you can see this dramatically changed. With a pagerank of 3, new blog posts began drawing in 2 to 4 thousand visits and general traffic is growing by around 50% per month.
While needing pagerank to get traffic instead of building traffic to get pagerank seems like a odd system, It’s hard to argue with these results.
What do you think?
What has your experience been with pagerank and its effects on your web traffic?
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It’s incredibly refreshing to see and blogger share his visitor stats with the world. Also congratulations on your success with the site.
I would say that the increase in your Google PageRank and the hike it visitor numbers were a part of the same process and it was coincidental that they occurred at the same time.
I’m continually reading articles downgrading the importance of PageRank. I’ve also had pages drop from 3 down to 0 and up to 3 again with no comparable change in traffic. However, I do think PageRank is a great general indication of how Google views a page.
As your site got out of the sandbox, and was seen to have quality inbound links and updated content, the PageRank and the traffic increased for the same reasons.
That’s my opinion anyway.
If you don’t mind me asking, Andrew, what are the peaks? Are they Stumbles, Diggs? I would love to hear how you got them!
Rob,
Glad to share and thank you for your kindness.
Like you I’ve read countless articles stating Pagerank is a hollow statistic and I tend to agree. It would seem logical that building some decent content and a few back links gets you on your way to having some Pagerank, and not the other way round.
As I’m sure you’ve found, getting solid info on basically anything from Google is like squeezing blood from a stone. I assumed Pagerank was a reflection of your traffic / links etc but these results might suggest otherwise.
But who can say.
The spikes are unique visitors as recorded by Google Analytics, each spike basically corresponds with a new blog post. I also bookmark each post after it’s published to about a dozen social sites. Digg, Reddit, Twitter etc.
Nothing different to what I was doing for the first 3 months, just since the PR update traffic overall has increased.
Thanks a lot for this post. My company has been working really hard to figure out how page ranking can boost our traffic and this is a great resource for us. Getting started in SEO can be really overwhelming for a new business, thanks again for this.
All the best,
Mayson