Google Engineer Hints at Quarterly PR Updates? On Mar 11/2004 on a WebmasterWorld Forum a Google engineer with the online nickname Googleguy seemed to hint in a jokeing way that Google might go to guarterly updates of visible PR. The following is what he said. "I heard that at PubCon, DaveN suggested that Google should only update the visible PR and link: data once a quarter or so... " to which edit_g responded "Is that a hint as to a new policy or are you just messing? (somebody had to ask!) ". Googleguy never responded back nor made any more comments on that thread. Well I think it is some thing to consider. Here we are without a toolbar PR update for 94 days. To me it seems like we might be right around the corner from a toolbar update. I have been working on my new site SEO Company getting ready for a big reciprocal links campaign and been thinking about how to make my offer more attractive. It seems people are more willing to give you a link if your site has high PageRank. So I worked out a deal that would get me some high PR text link ads. I talked to an internet friend that runs an online Hip Hop Jewelry site that needed a deeper crawl. He's off to get a quote on some text link ads that will give him a deeper and more regular crawls. I thought it would be good to post some good common sense pointers when purchasing text link ads and the benefits of text link ads. Benefits of text link ads. 1. Brings traffic to your site. In almost all cases this is your main objective. You want traffic that you can convert to sales. 2. Inbound links give weight to your ranking. You want numerous keyword anchored links from relevant pages. 3. The PageRank vote. Purchasing links solely for their PR vote is discouraged by Google. In fact some sites have had there PR transfer cut off for blatantly selling links based on PR only. Beware of these kinds of sellers. While PR is a gauge to the value of text link ad, there is more to it that than. Things to Consider when purchasing text link ads. 1. Make sure you have an agreement that can be renewed. 2. Pick sites that have a lot of inbound links. You can judge this by what PageRank value their pages have. 3. Ask to see a print out of the stats for the last 2 months with the option to login to the stats of the site. If you are not getting a home page ask to see the stats for the traffic on the filename of the page that is being offered you. If they can't provide them go somewhere else. 4. Don't get site-wide links! If site-wides are not already devalued they probable will be soon. 5. Ask for the page and position your link will be given on a domain. You want your link to be clearly seen so you can get as much traffic as you can. 6. Beware of curbers. Like the people that sell cars on the side of the road (they call them curbers) you don't want to buy from some one with doesn’t have an established business or is not working with one. If some thing goes wrong you want to have some recourse.
even if it WAS quarterly, we should've had it by now. 365 / 4 = 91.25. honestly, I just wish google would make up their mind. they don't want public PR? fine with me. take it off the toolbar, never do another update again. they want to keep it on the toolbar? then start updating it regularly- it's so much of a hassle to have link exchange requests denied because we don't have any "green"...
I think that's the point though... Google would probabally prefer you weren't exchanging links in order to spam the results (Which essentially what it is - gaining artificial links to increase your sites ranking)... Don't get me wrong - we all get links (And if you don't, you haven't got a hope), butI'm sure that G is well aware that the lack of PR updates is making it very hard for people to get links... There will be someone from the plex that reads the forums (GoogleGuy is a perfect example), and they will no doubt be loving every second of this.
digust: Ya I know. Its 95 days in another 2 hours. I just picked up 2 PR8s to sweeten up my partners page for my reciprocal links campaign. Hopeing to send out 30k. The site is new. I have a bunch of PR3/4 I picked up off my Page Rank Update List. That thing is all around the world. Dutch, French, German sites. I got a site wide on a PR7 with a number of PR6 subs, 30k other pages; Picked up a PR5 site wide with 9K of pages. Picked up 10 PR5 the other day. And some other stuff. I am going to be in the sandbox if there is such a thing. I think we are looking some changes with Google. I don't think they are going to do away with visible PR. I feel they are not updating to as it has turned into a market that is causing problems in there index. It will be interesting to see what happens.
SEBasic: Ya I think you are right on the money. I think they are going to have to do something or the index could become undone. But now with them having to answer to a board they won't be able to do anything to out to lunch. Like don't rock the boat.
Nice find Bob. I agree with ya, Google may just have changed their PR updates to odd dates and perhaps they will always very from now on to counter the SEOing etc. I supposed the next few days or week will tell.
PRBot.Com: I don't see they doing away with PR at all. I agree that going to a 3 month is going to take peoples eyes off the visible PR for sure. Yes, if we go much more than a nother well I may have to give Page a call and see what he going no.
I agree. PR is at the very core of Google but I suspect the times and dates the PRs will be updated will never bee at exact intervals any more just so so called "SEO experts" cannot give their clients any kind of meaningful dates aproximation for results and also to throw them off so they never know what is done right or wrong. I also think and hope they have done some "randomness" to the SERPS simply because if you have 100,000 PR8 pages in the same category and relationship with regards to search terms you MUST provide quality to both the site owners and the searchers and this too will help fight the spamm-type SEOs. You see, I think SEO is good for search engines. Its the idiots who confuse spam-doorway pages with SEO that make things bad for the rest of us.
PRBot.Com: Well it is more than just black hat stuff like doorway pages etc. The fact that money buys you SERP is not a good thing for the customer that is using Google. The customer wants content that is not commercial all the time. I expect at some point that there will be a set of filters that you can set that will filter out commerical sites from the SERP. Also I think that some thing is going to be done with links. I think that site-wides if they are not already devalued that is coming soon. Also I think that links from reciprocal link networks are going to be devalued also. There are lots of things we can think of to clean up the index. So if simple people like me and you can come up with stuff, what do you think Google is doing. It is an exciting time, I feel there is going to be a major shake up some time soon.
Hmmm. I like commercial results in my searches. 70% of my searches are product or industry related. The best way make sure all sites get qual share is to make the search results of every industry which have the same PR random results. This way PR maintains its integrity with respect to quality (which is important to G as well as us) and it would maintain integrity with regards to the rest of the sites with the same PR. In an open market competition is the law and it is competition which makes like better for the poor and rich. If we eliminate the competitive incentive from the search engines completely we will turn search engines into the same stupid search engines we used to have several years ago. I don't want that. I want to get search results with websites whose owners care enough to bring to my attention. I don't want to view poorly designed sites which were not given any consideration presentation wise. I don't always want the best prices, I want competitive prices and quality not cheap and no quality.
I totally agree with you. Either G updates the PR frequently/regularly or they remove it completely. It confuses things... (maybe that's what G wants)
PRBot.Com: Hush don't give them any ideas. That would be unacceptable. Do it to the BLs I don't care we have Yahoo, but don't mess with the PR.
Making it hard for new sites that is - those that already have some green are for the most part OK - the rich get richer and the poor poorer kind of thing. but again i can't see why google would take another swipe at new sites currently my site is half and half - most of my site has a PR including two of my links pages (visible PR i should say) - the rest of my links pages don't have a PR- it's great fun watching most people whose reciprocals are on the Page with PR4 accept and those whose links are on the PR0 pages not accept(or even reply to my requests).............. not!