Study: Google Page rank and Website Traffic Related
A serious debate in SEO forums: Does high Page Rank and Website Traffic Correlate? Some websites experience high website traffic even with PR 0 or 1 homepage, whilst some homepages with a PR of 6 or 7 receive very little traffic. Well, technically if you understand the definition of Google Page Rank, it is a probability measurement of having a random surfer in the internet ending up visiting your page (Read original Google Page Rank Definition).The the higher this probability, the more popular is your page and this is why Google uses it as a measurement of page “importance”.
So, what makes the page so popular? The answer is “LINKS”. Broadly speaking, the higher the Google page rank, the higher the number of inbound links pointing to the page/domain. You may ask why “LINKS” makes the page popular. The short answer is “referral traffic”. When you have inbound links pointing to your site or some page, and you look at your Google analytics data, you may wonder Google gives “sources of traffic” and one of this is “referrals”. These sources of traffic came from your inbound links pointing to your domain. The higher this referral traffic, the more likely higher is your inbound link quantity. Also the higher the referral traffic coming to the linking page of your backlinks, it is because that domain also receives a lot of referral traffic from other domains. “LINKS” are internet sources of traffic, it is why Google spends most of time perfecting their algorithm that might be centered around it. And this might explain why links from important pages (high PR) makes your page important also.
Take note that Google toolbar is delayed and is not real time. So it may be your real link popularity is already high and it gets you high referral traffic but your PR is low. This can explain of high traffic even with PR 0.This causes a lot of confusion among search engine optimisation practitioners. To confirm, a study has been conducted based on the above information. 50 different domains of different niches and in different Class C IP’s are being studied. Data gathered includes the present Page rank and traffic. The average of the % traffic per page rank interval is computed. Below is the analysis scatter graph:
The Y-axis is plot in logarithmic scale so that the graph can be clearly seen. Based on the above analysis, it says the higher the domain page rank the more accessible your site to billions of internet users. A random sample of 50 domains is conclusive. This is the experimental proof of the Google page rank random surfer model theory. And this explains why even though there are only very few sites with PR 9 or PR 10 such as Yahoo.com and Google.com. There are tremendous amount of links pointing to them almost anywhere in the net, so clicking those links will have a high possibility/probability of ending up in Google.com or Yahoo.com.
