The Myth Of Pagerank: What Determines Crawling?
March 13, 2009
Stumble it!There is a question from a user applying what he and some of you have been reading many times, and is amazing how this still believed by other webmasters. Many people think that if you have a site with a pagerank of 4 or more your site is an authority site in Google. But if you have a pagerank of less your site is useless.
Let´s see facts, Googlelady have a pagerank of 3 and each post is indexed few minutes after it goes live check this proof:
(You can check the post here)
Also there are many reviews that I wrote in the past like wtdirect review and was indexed and ranked less than 2 minutes.
On the other hand, we have a site with a pagerank 4 and it needs days if not months to be indexed and ranked well. So here is the question of that user:
I’ve read in several places that when a page has PR4 it gets crawled more often (once a day or something like that). I have PR3 (according to ALL pr checker websites i’ve been to), and up until last month when i wrote in google site:mysite.net it did not say anything special, but now, every time i write site:mysite.net it says “x hours ago” when x is ALWAYS less than 24 hours .
So my Question is this:
is it possible that my PR is actually 4 but it still didn’t update itself (i know it takes time), or is it still 3, but it’s just that my improvements (one of the improvements is a dynamically changing updates on the main page, etc.) made google “understand” that my website does change very often and hence it should be crawler more often ?I have to say – i haven’t done any backlinking improvements – i only made the inbound links better in a lot of ways, along with ALOT more seo improvements .
No, no, and nope. 
PageRank 4 is not a significant threshold. There is nothing meaningful about PageRank 4 and it’s time the industry stopped ascribing meaning or special worth to it. There is no basis for this. Let’s put this myth to rest.
I can’t be more emphatic about the falseness of this emphasis on PageRank 4. It has to die. If you are going to get ahead you must walk away from this myth. It’s a number that was arrived at in relation to backlink searches many years ago. The situation that gave rise to the myth went away, it ended, but the myth endured. I’ll explain.
History lesson
Many years ago Google used to show the backlinks of sites with a PR of 4 or more. This caused webmasters to make the erroneous assumption that PR 4 is the threshold between a good ranking and a bad ranking, that Google did not count links from -PR4 sites. Otherwise, why didn’t they show them in the backlink searches? It could be said to have been a reasonable assumption but at the time the Googlers were saying this wasn’t the case.
To the webmasters, because Google didn’t show links from sites with less than PR 4, they assumed that -PR4 meant you were crawled less, had less authority, etc. Over PR 4 meant your site had finally arrived.
Then during a London Pubcon DaveN suggested to Matt Cutts that this scheme was innacurate and Matt Cutts agreed. Not long after he arrived back at the Googleplex their search engine began showing a sample of backlinks across a range of PR.
Stop and examine the facts
Anyone who has ever ranked a site with an under PR 4 site knows that the assumption that -PR 4 is less worthy is an assumption without foundation. Anyone who has watched their rankings jump with -PR4 backlinks understands that the PR 4 threshold is absolutely false.
The superstition continues
So even though Google began showing PR 4 backlinks, to this very day many webmasters still cling to the mistaken notion that PR 4 is a significant threshold. It is not. This belief in the superiority or meaningfulness of PageRank 4 meets the definition of superstition: “A belief in something not justified by reason or evidence.” It’s a myth. The healing powers of PR 4 is a superstition.
So what determines crawling?
What determines crawling is the amount of links you have. Each link is a new door, so to speak, for a bot to find you. One can have thousands and thousands of links and still rank under 4, yet be better and deeper crawled than a PR 4 with less inbound links.
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March 13th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
That was a great explanation. I have kind of been wondering the same thing and there are a lot of myths out there about pagerank. It is hard to decide which ones are truthful and which ones are not. It is good that I had you to explain these kind of things though. I do not find his information anywhere else.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I have two sites that page ranked. one is pr 2 and one is pr 4. I can tell you right now that my pr 2 site gets 5 times the amount of web traffic and web sales then my pr 4 site. So it’s really a myth in my view that a pr4 is stronger or gets crawled more often.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
The pagerank that you see on a toolbar is just numbers (useless) what it counts is the internal pagerank of Google. What it counts is what Google thinks of your site.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I agree – some of my PR 0 sites get heavy traffic as compared to others with PR 3. I guess content is still king. However, has anyone seen a relation between PR and Alexa rank?
March 16th, 2009 at 5:39 am
As you correctly stated, toolbar PageRank is not an accurate reflection of a page’s true PageRank, largely because it is fixed at integer values and updated very infrequently. However, the calculated PageRank is determined by the number of links pointing to a particular page and the PageRank of the page that are linking to that page. If you say that links determine the rate of crawling then you are tacitly saying that PageRank is what makes your site crawled more frequently. PageRank is still a factor in the ranking algorithm however its effect may be masked by any of the many other factors that are taken into account. Which is why a page with low PR may rank higher than one with a higher PR.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:48 am
I totally can agree and offer my own site as proof. My site http://www.fmqinc.com has a PAGE RANK of 1 and is indexed in minutes. I recently made a post “Terminator Cancelled”, just do a Google for that term and you will see I rank above TV Guide, Gizmodo, Sidereel and Yahoo Answers! I have many post that outrank the “big Boys” with PR5 and 6 sites.
PR doesn’t mean anything.
BTW, That post was indexed in less than three minutes.
~Lanie~