Foreign Perspectives

Many people see a site with high pagerank (PR) and assume that the site also has high traffic.

They’re wrong to make that assumption: there is little correlation between PR and traffic.

Take a simple example: I registered a domain just over a month ago. It acquired PR2 a couple of days ago yet the only traffic that it has had has been from the google spider! There have been no real people visiting the site at all.

That applies all the way up too. Many blogs taking sponsored posts are finding that their high PR doesn’t equate to a high RealRank (RR) as calculated by PPP. The reason is really obvious when you look at some of the blogs: they may well have thousands of links to their site (hence the high PR) but have no content that would interest anyone so the traffic that they get is minimal and so too is their RR.

Ironically, advertisers are only starting to realise this and change how they allocate sponsored opportunities to use RR (ie actual traffic) instead of PR. They may not get as much PR passed to them from a low PR site but many such sites have very significant traffic indeed. A lot of those low-ish PR sites are written by people who want to be read; they’ve not promoted their site in the conventional way through massive link building programmes but rather just kept writing interesting stuff that slowly but surely builds a readership.

If nothing else, google’s crackdown on sponsored posts has highlighted just how useless PR was as a measure of the “importance” of a blog.