Many people consider page rank a kind of talisman that will magically take them to the top of the search engines. In reality, it just isn’t that important for most people.

Why isn’t page rank important? Because it has no direct effect on your positioning in the search engines. Page rank doesn’t mater in terms of where you’re going to show up, and where you show up is the major determiner of your revenue. Many people focus on page rank to the exclusion of everything else - they won’t trade links with sites that don’t have a high rank, and they go to insane efforts in terms of designing their pages to avoid “leakage.” It’s unclear whether leakage is a myth or not, but it probably is pointless to spend so much time worrying about it.

Why could page rank matter? It does for some people. For instance, perception can be important. Many people just don’t understand it - they overrate its importance, and having a good page rank can get you more link exchanges or make links on your page worth more. For people who build pages solely for the purpose of selling links, page rank is important because it is also useful as a rough indicator of the value of the link. Page rank does tell you a rough idea of what value Google places on the page, and how often it will spider that page. However, no one really knows exactly how the differences in page rank work in terms of what value a link will add to your site. Unless you’re selling links, your page rank isn’t that important to you - focus on your position in the search engine results.

Teve Torbes is an expert owner of a flea control site, who knows a whole lot about dog fleas. He has also created a valuable inflatable air mattress site.