"Why the hype"? You'll have to ask the people in threads like this who GIVE it the hype. PageRank was the foundation of Google and it is still "one of more than 100 factors" that Google uses for ranking pages in search results. Some time ago, Google made a conscious and deliberate decision to de-emphasize PR by reducing the frequency of public PR updates. Judging by threads like this one, that's not been very successful but I don't think it's fair to blame Google for that. Google keeps saying, "Look - it's not that critical - focus on making better sites", and webmasters keep saying, "Oh yeah right - we know you're hiding something and we want to know what the PR is for our pages so please do daily public PR updates". None of this says anything about Google. It says a lot about the infatuation - make that obsession some people have about PR. It's a lot more than 10. And site traffic and number of users on your site are not among the factors Google uses. PageRank Information
They've never said that they don't rely on traffic in ranking sites. They've never said explicitly that they do either, but they have included it as a potential ranking factor in their patents. Between the toolbar and the ability to determine what people do when they click on search results, I don't think it's unrealistic to think that user behavior is factored into the rankings.
Fair enough, although having a patent on something doesn't mean they are using it. On the other hand, I doubt that it's a very large factor. Look at the stats on terms most searched for - Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etc. Related: Yesterday I saw a headline that said "Paris Protests" and my first thought was, "Sheesh... what is that skank up to now?" before I remembered the student protests in Paris - the woman has hijacked a whole city
PR has been clearly defined by Matt Cutts as important in that it determines the depth your site is indexed. Isn't this a crucial piece to having your site deep crawled? I believe it is. I believe this has already been quoted here, lets do it again.
The definitive word in that quote is "one": It's not that PR isn't a factor in this or other respects. It's that there are many other factors - PR is just one of many. The over focus on that single factor is one of the things Cutts has also talked about elsewhere: Matt Cutts: What's an update?
All I'm saying is the rating system in Judo means something and one can be proud of their belts, there is no fast-tracking to a black belt. Whereas in paragliding the top rating can be acheived rather easily and every chimp has one, thus it holds little value. This is where google is at now.
I'd probably pay a few bucks to see a paragliding chimp... After Karate Kid ("wax on, wax off"), I pretty much lost interest in karate.
What the hell!!! I have a site (domain+wordpress default installation, no content nothing) and it got PR4 recently (may be on 4/4 - I don't even check that).
I don't think he meant that all new sites with pr 0 will now have pr > 0 after this update but that the update has only affected new sites with pr 0. I have noticed new sites, subdomains and pages which had pr 0 being updated to pr 3 - 6 so this is consistent with my experience.
Nice list Bob. It's especially interesting to see .edu and .gov BL counts. It's also a nice approach to marketing directory submissions. I've got a new site and just don't have the time to submit myself. I'll probably give your service a shot. /tom/
I think the guys at Google are laughing their a$$es off reading this thread It's worth screwing PRs around for a good laugh
Correct. We have heard of a few instances of this. However, it does seem clear that **most** sites that already had PR when this update occurred did not change, even if they "should" have changed based on the work done for them.
It's not websites, it's previously PR0 pages. An old domain with new pages got the new PR on the new pages, all the old pages remained the same. New domains (since all pages were new) got all new PR. It's not about the domains, it's about pages that were not indexed the during the previous toolbar export.
I imagine your sites had already been through a PR update. This one seems to apply almost entirely to new sites that had not yet been through a PR update. (there are a few exceptions, but not many, it seems).