Attention Google: PageRank is Flawed

I am suggesting to Google that something be done about the pagerank system. It updates on the tool bar way too slowly and it is also inaccurate.

Here is why I come to this conclusion. Let's say someone adds a link to my site from their own website or though a high pagerank page. If that page is like PR6 on the toolbar, it could actually be PR0 and worthless.

Google claims that PageRank is dynamic and always changing in the background so the toolbar is just a snapshot of what it was way back in May. The internet changes a lot in 3 months and even within a few days, that pagerank would drop right?

I heard you could get PR6 links from Adobe Forum, but these pages in the forum are probably snapshots of when the thread was up near the top when the toolbar updated. So is it more realistic that the background PR is actually reduced to 0 over time and that creating a new thread in the forum will actually have a "background" pagerank of 6 rather than N/A?

So how are people supposed to know how valuable a page is in terms of links if it is constantly changing in the background? How do we know what pages are more valuable and which ones are "authority" sites so that I can ask these people to link to my site if it is good enough?

I think Google should just automatically change the PR every month or every two weeks in the visible toolbar. Personally the reason I say this is 3 months was more than enough time to develop a very nice site. So if I ask people to link to my site and they see that it is only PR0, it looks really crappy as if something is "fishy" with my site having good content and looking nice but it has no pagerank and lots of N/A pageranks. Because of this, they will most likely assume my site is dangerous to link to and that I did some spammy practices that caused all my pages to have a grey bar. In reality, these are all new pages and it's just Google is taking too long updating the tool bar.

The people I'm asking to link to my site are top notch in my industry and I need more than PR0 on my homepage and N/A everywhere else if they are going to trust linking to my site... I was lucky enough to get a link from the biggest guy in the industry but he was a pretty nice guy and he probably saw how good my content was. It will probably be much harder pulling that off with many other people though.

 

Google has no desire or is under no obligation to report "PageRank" accurately or timely. They could tell all PR6 sites that they have PR0 or all PR1 sites that hey have PR7 - that is their business.

 

This is very inconvenient to both visitors and webmasters. Especially people who don't fully understand what PageRank is. Why even have a PageRank system at all then? (especially a toolbar to show all visitors)

 

Google don't want you to solicit backlinks, they certainly don't want you to solicit links based on your PR, and other sites PR. They also don't want people reverse-engineering the algorithm, so they deliberately keep webmasters in the dark.

 

I understand this fact completely, but they can still keep webmasters in the dark by updating the toolbar every few weeks or a month. An entire season (3 months) is a little too long though.

Why would they even create a toolbar showing PageRank to begin with if they wanted to keep webmasters in the dark?

 

In last months I see on many websites of mine that the toolbar pagerank is inaccurate. Some of them got quite high PR without any linkbuilding, others which are very good optimized have low PR.

Btw. have a look at DP forums homepage. My toolbar shows PR 4...

 

See the thing about pagerank is that you should not focus more on it. So what if it updates really slow? You just focus on your site traffic because that is what matters more than pagerank.

 

That's the problem though, I can focus on my site and try building links, but who want to link to a website with PageRank 0? Many people will not do that, even if my content is good.

 

My suggestion to you would be to by the company and run it your way!!

 

PR is just a number for me. If you believe in it, you trust it. I don't think any flaw on PR.

 

Without investing money into advertising, your PR will not matter especially if you're in a saturated niche. 7 years ago you could get nice organic traffic just by setting up a site with the keywords you want. Nowadays, there are so many competitors and every niche is full. You need traffic. Don't we all. To get it, try PPC or pay someone to put your banner on their site. Bum marketing is good, but targeted paid marketing constantly brings you traffic. In my niche, I see some of my competitors spending anywhere from $200 to $1000 a day on PPC. They are all ranked #1 or #2 for the most competitive keywords. Wonder why.

 

I don't get the impression the PR snapshot is always old data, I've seen threads here on DP less than a week old gain PR after an update.

 

I totally agree with you. All this focus on PR and backlinks etc compromises the content.

 

PS. google pagerank is always flawed...
every month there is different google dance and recent month is the worst i had ever seen. :'(

 

All this focus oN PR and Backlinks don't need to compromise the content
U just need to be real good

 

It is in google favour to make link building a bit of a gamble. They could easily provide an upto to date page rank but that would just help people figure out the algorithm.

 

hope Google heard about this .....

 

I do - I do it all the time. Why should I care if the PR is 0? If the content is good and relevant, then I link.

 

LIke people are saying, no obligation to tell us the page rank. I personally look forward to the updates. It is a nice surprise to see how well you have been doing in terms of SEO

 

PR is almost entirely for internal use, SERP and statistics collection using the toolbar. I don't think that Google care that much about the visual PR.