I frequently get asked about the relative importance of the Page Rank of a website versus the traffic to the website. This becomes especially important if you’re looking at revenue sources for your online business or if you’re looking at selling your website.
Question: Would you rather have a Page Rank 3 with 100 visitors per month or a Page Rank 1 with 1,000 visitors per month?
The Case For High Page Rank
- It’s often easier to sell a domain (and get a better price) if you have a high Page Rank and low traffic than the other way around.
- It’s easier to monetize the site by selling links which pass Page Rank to advertiser webpages
- It makes your website looks more prestigious and important
The Case For More Traffic
- It’s easier to monetize the site through pay per click, affiliate programs, and banner advertisements.
- It’s also easier to sell your own products or services to help monetize the webpage
- It will help your Alexa ranking which will give you additional credibility
My own preference is to focus on traffic as opposed to Page Rank. Page Rank is sexy but high traffic will make you more money unless you’re in the niche business of website flipping or selling links (which is a no-no in Google’s eyes).
What is your preference? As online entrepreneurs we obviously want both Page Rank and traffic but if you had to pick only one, which would you prefer?
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My site dropped ranked like crazy for my top keyword a few months ago. My profits went down. I focused on getting traffic using other methods instead of depending solely on Google. My traffic came back and profits are up and I’m still on the last pages of search results
11+ million page views in the last 30 days and rising…
it’s all about the traffic.
People get all freaked out about this and that for SEO and end up losing sight that it;s about having a functional and interesting website and ultimately you want to attract and keep people there. A great site does that.
Focus on your content and building something interesting and then people will link to you anyway, thus page rank and traffic going up.
I agree with Daniel. Check out my stats:
(direct) ((none)) 214,999 60.50%
google (organic) 68,201 19.19%
yahoo (organic) 13,297 3.74%
The rest are sites linking in, so that means 77% of my traffic comes from people that have bookmarked my site or have linked to it. If developers focused a bit more on content instead of going crazy over SEO, Google wouldn’t have so much power over traffic IMO.
Interesting enough, my stats are the other way around and I have just never bothered about SEO.
27.26% Direct Traffic
14.31% Referring Sites
58.41% Search Engines
I’m not saying don’t bother, SEO is important and once I redesign my sites, they will be SEO friendly and I will specifically be building incoming links – just don’t lose sight of the content itself
anyway………… traffic over page rank.. particularly from a long term monetizing point of view.
Yup, got to agree. Traffic before page rank any day. Especially since I run an e-commerce business. Generally, traffic = money, page rank is… well, not really useful.
Quite good recommendations, technically improving page rank is tedious task and these kind of advice is worth
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