If you're a blogger (or any other kind of website owner) and you haven't noticed the Google PageRank update taking place, then you just aren't paying attention. Whenever this happens, I notice it right off the bat. It truly is like a disturbance, a glitch or something not quite normal.
How do I notice? Things don't work quite right. My recent article on how to get screaming traffic had virtually no competition for the keywords as I used them and should have shot to the top of the Google search index. It didn't. BloggingZoom How to Get Screaming Traffic, which linked to it, went straight to the #1 position while my link was nowhere to be seen. My link eventually appeared in the #1 spot and pushed that one down, but it was after a couple of days.
PageRank (PR) and search engine results pages (SERPS) are two completely different animals.
PR is about the authority your website, or an individual page, has at any given time. It's based on the authority of external links which link to it, among other factors that I won't get into. Will it get you a lot of traffic if you have a high PR? Not by itself. I see websites with really high PRs that have less traffic than those with PRs of 0. If you're wondering why, it's pretty simple.
Where your links are currently situated in the SERPS is going to determine how much search engine traffic you get. Since the default search page for Google shows links in positions 1 through 10, that's where you want your links to appear. There's normally a lot of competition for any position on that particular page, for any given keyword or phrase.
Stop paying attention to your PR and pay attention to your SERPS!
I can tell you, after just two experimental articles, that no one other than advertisers (and possibly you yourself) care about your PR. Normal people, those who don't have the "gold" to spend on you, care about where you rank in the SERPS because that's how they find you.
Since publishing my first experimental article on how to make money online, I've been getting visits from people I've never heard of or visited myself. That always happens, of course, but now it happens much more frequently. Even the not-yet-famous John Cow stopped by after doing a custom search for "making money online" (yes, I check my referral stats, "John"). He's checking the competition!
A shmoke and a pancake?
What the hell does this have to do with anything I just wrote about? What the heck does PR have to do with SERPS? My point exactly.
[My apologies to Mike Myers.]
