“You Can’t Take Google Page Rank Or Alexa Rank to the Bank”
In the words of Frank Kern, ‘You can’t take Google PageRank or Alexa Rank to the Bank’.
Once you realize that, you will be much more successful at getting traffic to your website. Don’t get me a wrong, a high PR or Alexa Rank can mean the person is making A LOT of money.
BUT…
If all you do is chase around page rank, you will likely never end up in that position(to make a lot of money).
See, I was once addicted to increasing my Google Page Rank when I was first getting started.
I run a web hosting company and I was literally obsessed with increasing my PageRank of my web hosting company. I was spending all day going through every blog post I could find with PR. I would even skip places where I could easily obtain links only because the sites didn’t have Page Rank.
It got worse when I started purchasing text links to boost the Page Rank of my hosting website. I ended up paying over $1000 each month for those links I bought.
You know what happened? Google caught on to me and devalued mostly all of the incoming links I had to my website. The rankings that I spent so long trying to build up suddenly disappeared!
Very discouraging and disappointing 🙁
That is about the time I said ‘Screw all this worthless PR crap’
Ever since, I haven’t looked back. Now I have roughly 40+ websites with page rank and I haven’t done anything to try and ‘game’ the page rank system. All I did was natural and organic link building – building links on every website I possibly could, regardless of the page rank. From profiles, blog posts, forum posts, link directories, everything.
What I’m trying to say here is, once you focus on trying to game your page rank, your results will suffer. If you keep everything organic and natural, you will see far better success.
Onto Alexa Rankings…
I like to use Alexa rank as a gauge to how much traffic a site is getting. While it is by no means accurate, it can still give you a ball park estimate of how much traffic per day a site is getting.
But that’s all it does.
Nothing else.
A lot of people think they need to have a high Alexa rank to make any money. This is entire not true what so ever. I have a site ranked at 400k Alexa rank and it earns just as much money for me each month that one of my 90k rankers does.
It really amazes me how much people put on Alexa rank though.
Just the other day, I had someone call me a liar because I claimed that my web hosting company made over $600,000 in sales and my Alexa rank was only in the 200K range. Little did he understand that Alexa rank means jack squat and does not represent how much someone makes. (PS if you want to learn how I made $600k selling web hosting, check out my free course I made here)
The only good thing I can see about having a high Alexa rank is if you sell advertising on your websites. If all you do is affiliate marketing, forget about Alexa rank!
The moral of the story
Quit worrying about stupid Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank. Get out there and build your links organically and I assure you, the page rank and alexa rank will follow.
I leave you with this quote: ‘Rome was not built in a day’
Great article Dan. I agree, the Alexa and Google Page Rank is absolutely unimportant. What is important is traffic and sales. That’s it. I’m gonna move on and read the article about selling web hosting.
Very interesting article. I have a question though. I assumed that once my Alexa rank got higher, my website would show up higher on the search engine when the keywords in my title were searched for. Is this not the case?
Dan
I’ll second that one Dan.
I gave up worrying about PR etc for my blog a few months ago. Just let the thing grow organically with the odd comment on other blogs and forums and contentrate on List Building instead.
I figured with a decent size readership you can drive that traffic to your blog if you have something you want them to read anyway.
I really dislike these automated comment makers that get fired around – they devalue the efforts of real people making real comments. I even had one try to list swap with me the other day – you can guess what I said.
Daniel, Alexa Rank has no effect on your search engine rankings what so ever.
All it is good for is giving a rough estimate of how busy a site is. The search engines don’t care about that.
Peter,
Good call on the list building tip. Ive been focusing a lot on that lately. It definitely is very useful for driving traffic to your website. I absolutely love it now.
Forum traffic + blog commenting = awesome when combined with an opt-in.
Well, this post hits me hard. But you are right, perhaps I should focus more on the quality of my blog. 🙂
well hey there guys, i’ve been looking all over the internet for a GOOD black hat SEO forum.. I was looking for some suggestions
from you guys to point me in the right direction.
Thanks a bunch, this place is great btw.
Hello,
No. Your alexa rank has no relation to your search engine rankings unfortunately.