Right, I felt it was needed to start a thread purely on the views that people have on PR, some people follow it closer than Christ himself, others couldn't care less. Now don't get me wrong as I know how the whole PR system works and how easy it can be to gain, but anyway I'll get this thread going. I feel PR is the biggest scam, ever, on the internet! Even bigger than Loneygirl15 (if you want to call that a scam). What does PR prove? about as much as Alexa data does, it represents an extremely vague way of showing how 'popular' your site is. Well if it represents how popular you are, why aren't you automatically assigned a high PR when you rank for single keywords? I'm sure you become very popular being number 1 for silly terms. PR is viral marketing at your best. People encourage other people to download the Google toolbar just to find out what some seriously out of date data says about a site! Simply awesome job by Google to get everyone to download there toolbar so they can monitor practically everything me or you do. I mean like, how vague can you get trying to monitor every page of every website of the world on a scale of 0 - 10... it's just too vague for me Well now that I got that off my chest, what's your view on it?
I definitely see where you are coming from about google using it just to get people to use the toolbar. The only good thing I ever see about PR is that it gets your site indexed more often (so I believe), so if you make changes or new ocntent surely it gets seen sooner and benefits you sooner. As for what PR proves, Im not entirely sure, it doesn't prove anything definite unless you have a high PR and that must mean google likes you!
Maybe you should not be using PR in the manner you are. It gives people a very quick / brief overview of how established a website is, so it could be important for first time users of a shopping site to know it has some establishment. Page Rank is not just a tool for the SEM boys.
Yep, pagerank is USELESS unless your selling text links. Then you can command a higher price becuase people still think it will improve traffic and rankings.
How do they encourage PR? If you perform a solid ethical SEO campaign, the PR is pretty much a by-product. PR is the outcome not the goal.
huh? Theres always been ways around the google bar. I use http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ oh and you act surprised, Google is a advertising company, a pubic one at that. As a share holder, they have a responsibility to me to increase earnings. what did you expect?
Not true. PR does not effect crawling or indexing. That is a myth. Higher PR sites generaly get indexed faster because they are more popular but it is in no way influenced by PR. google doesn't need to know If done right they won't know. You have to be kidding? Why exactly did you dive off your porch? Google didn't force you to download it so it is your choice just like it is your choice to allow Yahoo to track what details they can through their toolbar and what the heck MSN may be in on the plot. What you guys don't realize is Google is trustworthy while some of these other game sites or whatever toolbars you have may not be and MAY actually be using your data wrongly.
Well actually, its so big, i mean no comments on it being a scam, or useful, what I m saying is, It is so big, that people base their opinion or worhiness of a site based on pr. Meaning, If a site is pr 0, the average user, who knows nothing about what it is, how to increase it, automatically says, the page is no good, 'Because google does't think its that important' And people trust google. Couldn't have said it better
I love PR! I'm making lot's of money selling links on some of my sites. average site + nice pr = good money
well this thread went on last week. PR doesn't judge how popular you are on the internet. IMO it judges how popular within the web developers community. it is judged on links which are put on peoples websites. Furthermore it is only a reflection of the work you have done.
EXACTLY! Having a quality site is the goal. if you have a good site with great content the links will eventually come naturally. A good site will get good PR with some promotion. However a site with good PR will not definitely be good
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think page rank is pretty useful. If nothing else it lets you know if a site has been penalized by Google. If it has, you probably don't want to like to it. It represents a very simple way (one number) to tell the quantity and quality of link. Page rank doesn't equal traffic. If you try to use it to measure how much traffic a site gets, then yes it is worthless--but that is because you are using the wrong tool for the job. However I do agree that if you just focus on PR you are going to be disappointed. First you'll be disappointed when PR doesn't translate into traffic. Second you'll be disappointed when in your quest for PR you do something that gets your sit temporarily banned by google or they set your entire domain to PR 0.
It's all about perception. If something is perceived as having value, then that thing has value, whether intrinsically or not. That's my take on it. Since the majority of people perceive PR to be of value, then by the logic above, it does have value and all the debate over algorithms and SERPs becomes a moot point.
PR, just like Alexa is a tool and it's up to each individual person how much value or use they get out of the tool. Saying it's good for nothing is very shortsighted as Google, the largest search engine, puts value in it, so should devolpers to some extent. People generally classify something as useless if they do not understand how it works.
one more vote for PR being great for selling links. dumb newbie webmasters think it will boost their rank
PR is invented as part of how bots are being dispatched. This is the system designed by Google Engineers. I don't think its scam. Its just that few people look at it in different way. Some find Google PR to be a money maker by selling links. They abused the system that is designed to help Google indexed websites. I disagree that PR is the biggest scam in the net.
One problem with the way search engines work is that webmasters try to get as many inbound links to their sites as they can. To achieve this, they post on forums (the main driver for the posts in this thread is the same), write dodgy articles, trade links and lots of other things. All this stuff is created just to achieve inbound links and not with the aim of providing quality content, which others may benefit from reading. I've written this article on the subject: The Problem With Google