Here's why you should focus on rankings instead

Even though new trends and innovative tools like AI come into the spotlight from time to time, many competitive industries continue to focus their SEO efforts primarily on link building that passes PageRank.

The basic assumption is that accumulating more backlinks passing through PageRank will ultimately improve your rankings and help convert more traffic to your website.

However, following this strategy is often risky due to the potential for Google search violations. More importantly, it almost always distracts from more sustainable ways to increase organic Google and Bing traffic to your website.

Since its introduction 25 years ago, PageRank has been a hot topic in SEO. That's no surprise, since Google has been using his PageRank for internal calculations ever since and continues to do so.

However, it's important to understand that a website or web page's PageRank value is elusive. It keeps changing as Google crawls the web and incorporates new data. Google does not share his current PageRank value with interested public users or verified owners of websites.

For third parties, no How to reverse engineer values ​​and rebuild Google's infrastructure and algorithms. Service providers circumvent this challenge by providing alternative rank names and values ​​that likely represent those used internally by Google.

There is no way to compare that calculation to the actual PageRank score in Google's index.

Additionally, Google does not utilize trust or reputation rank values ​​calculated by third parties. Third-party alternative ranks do not reliably assess the value of backlinks.

Simply put, link buyers who pass PageRank cannot estimate whether a particular backlink will increase a website's visibility on Google. Therefore, focusing on building backlinks that pass PageRank is like gambling, hoping to hit the jackpot.

There are other problems with SEO strategies based on link building that pass PageRank. It requires a continuous and growing effort, and an ever-increasing budget coupled with link building.

For companies with limited resources, this means that over time, less budget is allocated to other areas such as infrastructure, codebase, performance, content publishing, marketing, and brand building. As a result, his SEO signals for more important websites often become worse or inconsistent.

Building backlinks that pass PageRank to manipulate rankings represents a violation of Google Search Essentials (formerly known as Google Webmaster Guidelines) and can lead to manual penalties if detected. The fact that there is does raise yet another problem.

In other words, an SEO strategy that focuses on buying backlinks that pass PageRank will work. Still, this is still an expensive guessing game that could ultimately lead to dramatic traffic loss if Google finds out.

However, there are much better SEO alternatives. How you allocate your SEO budget to achieve the best ROI depends on your individual website.

Factors that play a role include:

• Landing page volume.
• Unique sales proposition.
• performance.
• brand.
• Technical acumen of the responsible team.

There are safer SEO tactics than link building that passes PageRank.

transportation link building

Website owners who have focused on links that pass PageRank for years can now move on to building links to convert traffic.

This strategy, aptly suggested by former Google engineer and Search Engine Land contributor Fili Wiese, requires far fewer links, allows for immediate ROI measurement, and, importantly, allows you to get more from Google. There is no risk of being penalized.

The latter point should be an important consideration given how problematic Google penalties are for website operators who rely primarily on Google traffic.

performance

All else being equal, any website will rank better on Google for relevant queries if it performs faster than its competitors.

Google consistently focuses on user experience as part of its business model. Users prefer websites that load quickly, so fast websites are known to outperform slower competitors in Google Search.

brand

Another often underestimated SEO factor is branding. Google doesn't favor any particular brand.

However, users' click behavior tells Google whether the ranking landing page is what they were looking for. And users prefer to click on search results from brands they know and trust.

This is why increasing brand awareness leads to higher CTR and is a great way to improve rankings for competitive queries. The insights provided by Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are invaluable in this regard.

unique selling proposition

Provide accurate information to Google and other search engines, unique results Responses to user queries are very important. Therefore, presenting a unique selling proposition as a business and on each indexable page is the key to ranking well.

Search engine algorithms and users need to understand why your website or landing page is exactly what they were looking for. And why it's better than competing SERP alternatives. A unique selling proposition combined with high brand recognition is one of his SEO's biggest opportunities for continued growth.

crawl budget

For large websites operating in fast-paced industries like retail and travel, proactively managing your crawl budget is a top SEO priority.

If your website's revenue-generating landing pages aren't crawled and re-crawled often enough, users will end up visiting landing pages with outdated content, which will hurt your website's rankings.

When that happens, users tend to look for other search results. Not only is this a loss of potential converting leads and damage to brand awareness, it's also a strong negative signal to Google that your users are not satisfied.

As signals of declining user satisfaction persist and increase over time, your website's rankings can suffer. Not only can this be prevented, but you can also reverse this trend by helping search engine bots focus on desirable landing pages.

Another often-ignored SEO best practice, utilizing server logs, plays a key role here. In the wrong hands, it can be a magic bullet for SEO.

signal consistency

Search engine bots and algorithms are often confused. When that happens, your website's rankings plateau for no apparent reason.

Unintentional and improperly implemented redirects, incorrect canonicals, incorrect noindex, incorrect hreflang implementation, and incorrect robots.txt directives are the most common technical reasons why websites fail in organic search. One of the.

This is most often due to old legacy solutions. As websites grow and entities are constantly changing, you need to check and verify the consistency of your SEO signals to avoid obstacles in a competitive niche.

Signal consistency can be checked and cross-checked using several crawling and analytical SEO tools. Tools like Botify, JetOctopus, Lumar, Oncrawl, Ryte, and Screaming Frog, among others, provide compelling insights into website content and technical signals.

These are a great starting point for ensuring consistency in your SEO signals and improving your organic rankings. Analyzing on-page and off-page crawl data as part of your regular SEO audit cycle can yield great results. Smart website operators implement such defensive SEO audits into their global SEO strategies.

Focus on sustainable organic growth

The vast majority of ranking websites have little or no backlinks. Their visibility is due to other his SEO signals. Although PageRank is often cited online, it is completely useless for search engine optimization.

Building backlinks that pass PageRank can occur at the same time as increasing rankings, but they cannot be correlated. At the same time, building backlinks through PageRank is risky and can result in manual penalties. But most importantly, focusing on PageRank tends to distract from the opportunity for superior, measurable, and sustainable organic visibility growth in SEO.