Does a loss of pagerank really affect your traffic?

Google’s PageRank smackdown has left a lot of bloggers bemoaning the loss of traffic and prestige their blogs recieve, but does having your Google PR wiped out or lowered really affect how many visitors you will get on a daily basis?

From my experience, the answer is a resounding “NO”.

The first of my blogs to get slapped for selling paid advertising was my food and recipe blog, Cooking… by the seat of my Pants! One day I had a Google PageRank of 3, with the hopes of easily making a 4 or a 5 on the next update. The next day I sat at a PR of 1, the following day I had a firm PR of Zero and it has sat at this level for over 3 months now. In that time my traffic has tripled and I have seen no loss of referrals from Google itself.

As a concrete example, on October 7th last year, when I still had a PR of 3, I received 17 referrals from Google searches.  On March 6th 2008 and with a PR 0, I got 84 visits from Goolge search referrals.  I’d call that a marked increase, wouldn’t you?

In the end, the loss of toolbar PageRank hasn’t cost me much of anything in the way of traffic or exposure. What the lack of measurable PageRank has affected is my ability to sell advertising. Since most companies that use the Internet as a marketing tool still use PageRank as their benchmark for ad pricing and availability, it has become difficult to sell any of the higher profile advertising that I was able to use in the past. I have hopes that advertisers will begin to look at Izea’s new RealRank as  aviable number in the future, but until then I am working on a few concepts that may get my PageRank reinstated without precluding selling a few advertisements here and there in the process.

That, however is another entry.

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