Google Page Rank still matters in 2018 because it is working in the background of your rankings. The public page rank was eliminated long ago, and that is why most people think that it is ancient history. The last page rank update was in 2013, but that does not mean that Google stopped using. They just stopped showing it to you, and that is where you must do everything that you can make your pages rank as high as possible because Google is still trying to judge you on the value of your page. Instead of thinking that page rank went away, you must consider that page rank is alive and well, it is counted by different factors, and it can still leave your pages out of the top half of the first page of any Google search.
- SEO Still Matters
This article from SEO Jet explains why it is so important to have the right mix of anchor texts in your backlink profile. Besides, marketing would be dead if SEO did not matter. You can be told every day for a thousand years that page rank does not matter, but SEO is still the best way to get people to your site. SEO takes into account so many things, and all these little things will add value to your pages. The SEO that you are working should add to that value, and you will find that each step of that has changed a bit.
- Backlinks
You need to make backlinks for your site that all function in different ways. You cannot put out the same backlink to 20 different sites. You will black flagged for spamming, and you could be blocked from Google results. That is a brutal way for you to lose business, and you must be sure that you have worked with someone who can show you how to make backlinks that vary in their style and delivery. If you have not done this, you will be looked at spammy even by people who are casually reading the articles where your backlinks appear.
Backlinks must appear in as many locations as possible, but they must appear as naturally as possible. You must link in a way that does not call attention to your company, and you must not link to anything that has been flagged as spam. This is why you must be sure that you have a website that has been programmed well so that the value of the backlinks does not drop. Imagine how defeating it would be for you to create backlinks that all look the same, that look like spam, and do not add value to the article you have written. You will lose readers because you were not linking to important, or it was because you were trying to sell something instead of educate.
- Optimize For Mobile
The value of your webpages goes up if you have optimized for mobile. Google made this change not long ago, and you must be sure that your site was programmed by a designer to work on all mobile browsers. A site that is not optimized for mobile will lose a lot of the internal ranking that you built up in other ways, and you could lose customers because they do not want to fiddle around with your site.
- Use Varying Keywords
You can make backlinks all day long that vary in style, but you cannot use the same keywords over and over. You must be sure that you have created long and short keywords that all point to your site and what you do. You could use your location to create better keywords, and you must think of shortening keywords or using different names for your business so that you can make your keywords as unique as possible.
- Add Your Links Early
There is some indication that you get more value for links that are early in your documents. This is because the links are in the first half of the document, and you will find that you might want to get your links in early so that people do not feel surprised by them. You are trying to educate the public while also selling, but you should not surprise your customers with a link at the end of an article that seems to be spam. Be careful placing the links, and make sure they are valuable.
The people who are trying to make their websites more popular must take each of these things to heart. You can build backlinks, but they cannot all be built in the same way. You cannot ignore SEO, and you cannot use backlinks that go to spammy links. Your site must be optimized for mobile viewing, and the keywords that you have chosen must vary as much as possible. All these little things fit together to make your site much more popular while rising up the Google rankings. Whether you see it or not, the page rank is still there.