Does Pagerank Help Your Sales

Recently we stumbled across a few blogs and threads in forums that noted that they look at that little green toolbar to know if it's 'safe' to buy from the website.

It appears that a growing number of individuals are taking a quick peek at the Pagerank of the website before purchasing from an ecommerce site. If the site has little or no Pagerank the potential customer moves on to another website that offers similar products.

First of all both the Google PageRank and Google toolbar are both trademarks owned by Google and it was never meant to offer shopping advice.

However it does reflect to a point how important Google feels your website is. So the general consensus among those blogs and forum threads is that if Google feels that website is vaild, it should be considered more valuable than if Google assigns little worth to the website. The same line of thought notes that it takes time to build Pagerank, so that the business must of been online longer than 15 min.

This has lead to a serious discussion among SEO experts, Web Developers, Ad agencies and Business owners. Are potential customers really abandoning shopping carts because of Pagerank?

The answer is yes some people actually are.

They fear that a website without Pagerank could be setup just to scam people. We by no means are saying that all websites with no Pagerank are scam sites. What we are saying is that some people are using the Google Toolbar as a refrence for the website. We want to stress that Google does not say anywhere that this is what the toolbar is designed for.

But it does make sense that people would look for some sort of refrence before jumping to buy from a new store for a product with their credit card. It just happens that the Google Toolbar is installed on so many browsers that it sort of lends credibity to the website.

This was found on Google.
"Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank"
http://www.google.com/technology/

It actually appears that Google's toolbar might be the leading refrence for e-commerce sites. As Google noted, this is a site that Google feels is higher quality. Not that their product is higher quality, but that more people link to this site so it should be of higher quality.

Maybe Google did mean this to happen? Maybe they didn't. The point is that people are using this now.

by Roger Wehbe

About Yooter InterActive:
Yooter InterActive is a leading Search Engine Marketing / Search Engine Optimization firm based in Bethlehem, PA. We could be reached on the web at ( http://www.yooter.com ) or 610.867.8312