With all the crazy activity in the various webmaster communities regarding the downgrading of page rank on so many well established sites is there an opening for Yahoo or MSN to jump in with their own ranking type scale. It seem people in general have always been facinated by ranking things numerically for comparision purposes (see the popularity of 'hot or not' sites). I know many folks say getting rid of page rank would be best but considering all the 'press' Gooogle has and is receiving because of it I think it would be very helpful if one of the other (or all of the other) search engines stepped up with a ranking algorithm of their own. Do you think other search engines have been working on some sort of ranking? If you were developing a replacement for Gooogle page rank what changes would you make?
I think at this time, where Google currently getting messed up with their PR system, I'd say that its not bad for other search engine to make their own PR system. But, it is still also possible that it will be used as an advantage to earn money through, of course nothing else but "paid linking".
I think Page Strength is a pretty good alternative, as it does give you an indication of the various factors that add up to make your total.
page strength was broken for the longest time and as far as I know it still does not work all the time. Plus the fact that you have to pay to check sites kinda sucks.
How many checks a day can you do for free? hahaha, question answered: I don't think this service would qualify to uproot Google.
The point I think most are missing on DP is that Google was not built for Webmasters. It was built for end-users who want to do searches. So if other search engines create their own PR system really doesn't matter. The only people effected by PR are people who watch it and try to manipulate it into meaning something. My Mom has no idea what PR is. She really doesn't care. She surfs around all day using Google to find things and clicking on various links as she surfs around. That is the audience Google cares about. They of course also care about their advertisers that keep their stock price moving upwards but most of them do not care about PR either. The faster Webmasters learn to forget about PR and where they are listed in search engines, the more successful they will be long term. Produce great sites with great content and the search engines will not ignore you.
Google's services are search and adwords, not publishing your PageRank. Yahoo site explorer definitely ranks the strength of links to your page. It is highly correlated with PR of the page linking to you, but also seems to be adjusted by the number of links on that page. Site explorer also shows a relative ranking of different pages within your site. All of this information seems to be closer to real time (relative rankings change in predictable ways day to day, for example, if a site removes a link to your page, the strength of that link will drop in Yahoo Site Explorer for a few days and then disappear completely).
I think google makes a lot of money off webmasters with adwords and with them showing adsense. I don't think end-users care at all about page rank. The point I am getting at has to do with Gooogles relationship with webmasters, which is very important to their bottom line. As I stated above I think it is about it's relationships with webmasters.
Page Strength was a good find...thanks for the link! Tells me much more than the google toolbar does.
Jay: Actually Google's relationship with the rank and file Webmaster really doesn't matter. AdSense and AdWords work because they produce revenue and ROI. I once owned/operated the 5th largest ad network in the world and I can tell you that webmasters will work with anyone as long as you do three things: 1. Answer their emails 2. Pay them on time 3. Give them more revenue than the next guy. Google doesn't even do the first item and people stand in line to work with them because they have all of the traffic.
I don't think they do the third very well either. I disagree that their relationship with webmasters is so perfect and I think any company can fall from grace.
Jay: I agree with you on both points... Google doesn't deliver great revenue for many Webmasters. Almost every one of our portfolio companies and all of our incubators sell ads themselves. G produces poor ad revenues for most sites. And any company can fall from grace. I just don't think Google's fall from grace would be based on its relationship with Webmasters. Webmasters are a very small, and generally, minimal impact audience.
I guess I am over-estimating the importance of webmasters in the Gooogle profit equation. I know it is the everyday folks that give Gooogle it's search market share but without webmaster putting up adsense and using adwords (or recommending it) wouldn't Gooogles profits be hurt? Also what would happen if webmasters stopped allowing Gooogle to index their sites, what would happen to Gooogle search results? Isn't that the reason Gooogle is willing to punish people by lowering their visual page rank but not de-indexing them or hurting their SERPs, if they did that then they would be shooting themselves in the foot by providing less relevant results. If they started banning a whole bunch of good websites from the index then those sites results would be reported by other search engines giving the other search engines an edge.
Google does need webmasters' cooperation, after all Google relies on getting the content from webmasters for free for their search index. If webmasters don't give Google free content, Google has no search results. They've also started asking for a lot more work from webmasters lately (with heavy-handed "suggestions" for what the content and structure of websites should be like, "nofollow," and of course snitching). Given Google's market share, there's almost no chance that many webmasters will ban Google from indexing their sites. If Google had 30% share, that would be much more possible. However, Google could come under more fire from news media organizations which could ban it from indexing news stories for Google News. It is already under fire from tv networks for youtube content and from book publishers for google books.
Thanks for the information wdwp, I don't think this latest folly by Gooogle will be their downfall by any stretch of the imagination but things like this will remain in the memories of webmasters for a long-time and if the day should come when Gooogle does falter they better not be looking towards the webmasters to help save them. There have been many companies in history that thought they were invulnerable....but we all know how that story ends.