For a while now, we have been saying that when measuring online success you should focus on metrics that offer real value like site visitors and conversions rates. Rather than the usual ones touted by SEO companies (Google page rank, number of page 1 listings etc). With this in mind, it is good to know that the mighty brains at Google agree! As illustrated by this recent post on Webmaster central: “Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.” – Susan Moskwa (Google Employee) FYI, here’s the post If you want some help adding Google analytics to your site, we are happy to do it for free – Click here for details
