If this is real I totally am glad. I have enough to worry about in my SEO stuff. They will probably find another system (algorithm) to crush our sites with.
I must be the only one disappointed at this news if its true. If Google remove their PageRank red herring, then all of my competitors will be a step closer to knowing the truth behind Google rankings. Bummer
I was sharing my opinion about the changes in WMT's the other day and touched on the fact that they had removed PR from WMT's.. To be honest, I think this is a cop out by Google... If they were serious, the toolbar would have been the first to go. Removing it from WMT's will not do anything if the toolbar PR is still visible. Actually the PR distribution in webmaster tools has been reported in the past by Google to be more up to date and the most reliable way to check your sites PR. So wouldn't it make sense to remove the less reliable one first? Cheers James
Ahw, don't you think it will affect the advertiser, sometime they relies on the PR of a site to let them know that the site is old/ or good enough to be payed for an advertisement.
I think it has more to do with traffic, if you have a look at Google's ad planner, it gives info like.. keywords searched for, Unique visitors, Reach, Page views, Total visits, Avg visits per visitor, Avg time on site, sites also visited... etc. Nowhere does it mention page rank. Its all about how many eyes they can reach. I have several advertisers target one of my sites, that sites main page is only PR 2 (internal pages PR1), but it does over 2million page views a month. Cheers James
haha, is it many people visited USA governement every day? Or just the pagerank 10 are just good looking bar for the website? I don't know
I can't publish the article online, but I'll PM you in couple days with some excerpts and graphs. Gimmie some time to sift through them, though
In the same niche? With the same amount of content? With the same keywords targeted? There are SO many factors, your argument makes no sense. Yes, PR0 sites can rank great. But: YES, PR is a ranking factor. If Google KEEPS saying so - it's probably true, unless you can prove otherwise, which obviously you can't. Focussing on PR for the sake of the green bar is useless. PR itself probably isn't. ;-)
I am glad to see less emphasis on PR. I know my focus has been SERPS and the traffic quality they bring in to the niches I am promoting. I would rather have relevant traffic then high pr. Still though some advertisers act like PR is super important along with alexa and imho both have never really shown the actual value of a sites worth.
Service industry websites can cover a lot of ground .. and can cover hundreds/thousands of niches .. Content is king regardless of niche. PR can be a ranking factor .. or not .. depending on what it is you are doing, or what you choose to imagine, and by the serps, traffic, and ROI, Google has already proven that the little green bar doesn't really account for much of anything at all. I don't focus on page rank .. I never have .. but I have had to answer questions from clients about why they were doing so well when, according to Google and it's silly little green bar, they weren't. I've known for years that page rank was a ruse .. not once, in my 12 year career of developing on the net, have I ever promised, or even made mention of page rank in my promotionals .. Page rank to me, is more like a piece of playground equipment than it is anything else, in that it's only fun as long as you're playing at the park. With regard to marketing, page rank was a win, win for it's company, Google. But keeping it all in perspective, as we should, we have to understand that Google is a company .. not the internet itself .. and because Google is a company, it will have it's little toys, gimmicks, and angles .. not too unlike any other company that's out there. Money talks and B.S. walks, and if you were to look at the bigger picture, regarding the internet as a whole, you would understand this, and it would help you to move beyond the idiocy of things like page rank.
PR in WMT was completely useless. They are just refactoring WMT in my opinion. It has nothing to do with PR.
Glad that this is over. Now, we can work on getting ranked high for keywords and work on getting in traffic. One less thing to focus on (since you were forced to focus on PR as a webmaster, as it was the only way others rated your site) and concentrate on what is important, TRAFFIC!!!
...and on thousands of other forums, blogs, wiki's and everything that's not nailed down. Think about it, how will spammers know what to spam? But i don't think Google will drop it, webmasters install the toolbar which sends every page you visit back to home base. Google likes to track webmasters, and link up their data.
I don't know why all of you are saying "pagerank doesn't matter". Actually, it falls hand in hand with many other things. For example, if you are concentrating on getting a higher pagerank, then you are probably doing some link building campaign to increase it. Well if you are increasing your links, your pagerank AND search result rankings are both going to go up... Just like if you are concentrating on building content and building links, pagerank is going to increase automatically at the same time...
Not always true Peppy. You can rank well without having pagerank. And those No follow links that everyone is afraid of do not flow pagerank juice but do help your ranking in the serps. I would rather have a low pr and actually get traffic then a high pr with very little traffic.
Point I'm trying to make: that depends on your business model. I'd rather make $2000/month off a site because it's a PR7, than $500/month off a site because it gets traffic. PR = $$ -- it all boils down to your business model. And in a diversified business model, I'm pretty sure there's room for various strategies