I thought rather deeply about PR today, and as it turns out, PR is actually MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Now you see, Pagerank doesn't mean anything, it doesn't do anything, it is nothing really except for a green bar! Then why is everyone going in circles trying to get their pagerank better? The Google Pagerank: - Doesn't tell you about the quality of a website - Doesn't tell you about the visitors to the website - Doesn't tell you about the family friendly status of the website - Doesn't tell you if the website does everything legally or not - Doesn't tell you if the website is safe for browsing - Doesn't tell you if the website IS actually there or not (remember expired domains?) - Doesn't tell you if the website ranks well for its terms in Search Engines - Doesn't tell you if the website could be trusted - Doesn't tell you if the website has been around for a long period of time - Doesn't tell you if the website is worth browsing. All the Google Pagerank Indicates is: - How many pages link to the Website and... what are the benefits of pagerank? - You could sell links for more Why would people buy High Pagerank links? - For High Pagerank and ranking better in Search Engines. But isn't it imminent that a PR1 related site helps more in ranking than a PR5 non related site? Now why would someone want to buy High Pagerank links then? - For High Pagerank So what comes out from this is that -----> Buying Links-----> Getting High Pagerank ------> Selling Links Another website repeats the cycle. The whole pagerank mania is nothing guys seriously. I mean look at Alexa rank, it at least tells you - If the website is safe to visit - If people like to visit the website - If the website is popular But Pagerank? Its TOTALLY USELESS. Everyone is buying links just to get good pagerank and then sell links to another person who would buy their links to get good pagerank and then sell links to another person. With the measures that Google now has, Pagerank has just become totally useless, nobody can even sell links now, if Google catches you anyhow, you're done, 0/10, Grey Bar, out of Search Engines, so practically, just not worth the pain and effort. ------------------------------ MY SUGGESTIONS TO GOOGLE ------------------------------ - Base pagerank on the quality of a page's content, what this would mean is that right now, people are buying links to get good pagerank, today on the internet only Internal linking within the websites is increasing, which is NOT benefiting the entire Internet world in any way. However if you base the pagerank on Content, then it would ACTUALLY MEAN SOMETHING, people would throw in loads of content on their websites to get good pagerank, which would mean that the Internet would become a much better, larger and much more informative place than it ever was, Pagerank would actually be good. - Make TRAFFIC a factor as well, like Alexa Rank, Google too should track the hits on pages and make THAT a factor for Pagerank too, so that websites which more people like to visit get better rankings and therefore get more people to them, this would mean encouragement to better stuff. - PUT AN OPTION in your Search Engine to Get SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS by Pagerank, when you would have put the above mentioned stuff in your algorithm, people would love to order search results by the pageranks of the pages, which would mean a better overall searching experience for everyone, and some real benefit of having good pagerank (ie more traffic) --------------- I hope you comment guys IT
This is the most significant point you mentioned. Excellent writeup. First time someone made some sense to me. At the end of the day, google should give more weight to CONTENT and not to those ridiculous MFA/Duplicate RSS sites/automated spam sites.
Yeah! and all the ridiculous comment spam, blog spam, splog spam, blog post spam, reviews spam would STOP. When linking would not be as huge of a factor as it currently is, the Internet would become MUCH MUCH better, and if you take out linking altogether, people will actually start linking to other good places as well (These days a lot of people don't link to other websites in fear of losing their PR to them by external linking) The ONLY links which should be counted are from trusted, authoritative websites, and that too should be a really small factor. Also, search Engine ranking should not be based on Links too as much as it is, thats another thing I want to say, it should be LARGELY based on Content, while it does make sense that if many people think that a website is the right source of something, so it should be ranking good for that. But right now, that thing is being exploited. Content should, seriously, be KING. IT
You cant really award pagerank on traffic. I can create a 99c info proxy and get 1k visits a day in a few weeks, yet if a wrote a quality article on an Icom 2800-H 2M radio i would be lucky to get 5 hits a day. And no related links dont mean much when it comes to pagerank and rankings, sheer authority is king.
I'm not saying that you need to base all of pagerank on traffic, but I'm suggesting to make it a factor too, also if Google could put in so many measures for tracking spammy links and stuff they could FOR SURE key in some measures for detecting traffic such as that! Related links mean a lot, I believe you are misguided here. Authority means bollocks at the the moment unless Authority has Pagerank, which would only mean more pagerank for you. Which is the same as non-authority having pagerank. IT
The only issue or rather challenge is to use CONTENT as important factor in SERP. Earlier, when backlinks were not the important factor. SE's used to use keywords, meta tags etc, which resulted into lot of spam. eventually google moved to backlinks. Now its being spammed. So whats the next step. Now if google would consider content as primary factory, 1) they need to see which keyword is being cloaked. 2) Keyword density (of course there should be some limit) 3) Site niche and its relation to the post (I dont want to see myspace site ranking high for a forex keyword, that's BS) 4)Effectively ignore and simply kick out automated RSS and duplicate content sites.
Don't beleive that quality website with high number of visitors will have not many links. So, PR is one of the criterias up till now.
Related links mean alot for human click throughs, however they don't mean much to rank despite everyone harping on parrot fashion they do without testing anything. Example One: Search Google for "SEO", not the easiest term to rank for. Sem-Link.com is page one. Backlinks There's Florists, Jewelery, Fashion, Hotel Resorvations, Projector Systems, Packaging Manufacturers, Marine and the list goes on. Any SEO links? Yeah 1 or 2 or rather about 1% of the backlink profile. Sorry but i've ranked for too many of the tuffest terms out there with non-related links, and done control tests to check the importance over unrelated authority links and i'm telling you right now if you want click throughs get related links.. If you want to rank, get authority with good anchor regardless of niche.
I find pagerank to be fairly helpful. I do a lot of buying and selling, and it's always an indication that a website is likely to be legitimate if you can see at least PR 3 on the green. I like pagerank, it gives you a quick glance at how popular the website is. Websites with high pagerank ususally indicate the website has been online a fair which, which can ususally mean the website will be quality. Also, I would imagine only a fraction of webmasters try hard to increase their page rank. Many of the best sites are university or college based websites, and many are small home made websites. It is evident that both would probably not carry out linkbuilding, thus not effect thei natural pagerank. I personally like PR, and hope it's here to stay.
Yeah, ultimately PageRank is a crack of shit. It means nothing... apart from those who wish monetize their site... and there are a lot of those on here
It is even more so after this update, when you have the scenario of having 10 pages about 6 levels deep that recieved PR4 yet they are only linked from a single PR0 page. Or you have a forums that's PR6 but doesn't even have 10% of the links, and quality of links as DP. But i do somewhat agree with Ian, a (working) Pagerank score is handy when browsing to see how much credability a document has, when signing up for things, entering log-in details etc it can provide another measure of a site or pages authority. I owned sites when the first ever public Pagerank export occured, and yes back then when PR first started to become a guage for link sales i sold links.. But i'm long over it because frankly it's a poor business model. However i'd love to see the metric continue, but only if it's accurate which it is not.
@you and sweetfunny Yeah? well guess what dude, Pagerank can be easily faked as well, so don't fall for it, ever. Then secondly, to what sweetfunny said, there's two things, if you buy links from non related sources then they SHOULD be having good link power themselves in order to help you in any way, however related links are better since they don't need much power to get you ranked upwards. (HOWEVER I am not saying that related links can be PR0 too, they need to have SOME authority and quality) IT
i can only sign that! the pagerank, like it is right now, is the fundamental reason for all these spammers and blogs that are just flooding the internet. it's just insane.
I think this is smartest thing I have read about pagerank on this forum. Seriously, people obsessing about PR through links totally junks up the entire internet. You are 100% right, if they reworked PR the internet would be a much more useful place.
The first thing I do whenever I install the Google Toolbar on a PC is to go to the options and deselect PageRank.
In google's defence, their ranking technology revolutionized search engines and improved the quality of results for browsers ten fold. Let's all be glad we aren't still using altavista.