Why would Google remove PR but still offer it as an option in the newly updated Google Toolbar? This is really strange and I have yet to hear anything that made sense on the matter. Trustrank, Pagerank or otherwise, let us know, then update the toolbar accordingly.
All valid points but as I said. Im am NOt of the opinion oh its got PR0 it must be bad. Obviously, if the quality of the site says it is good PR0 or not then I will trust it. But if a site is PR0 (other than being new) it is LIKELY to have LESS of an investment in it and be taken less seriously. This is NOT always the case, but is ANOTHER helpful indicator, that is all. Will it determine if I purchase: MAYBE I would not purchase from an SEO firm that has been booted out from the SEs, I will not buy from a nigerian site unless I can tell it is well established (serps, whois, indexed pages, PR, etc etc) So, as I said to ignore it 100% is as foolish as to trust it 100%. It is never likely to be the deciding factor but if I am on a shop that is PR0 I will check why before proceeding..logical precaution.
What don't you guys understand about PR data being crap. You can't possibly be making good decisions because the data your decisions are based on is unreliable and highly suspect. For instance based on today's PR I guess you guys will never shop on the Internet again. But how do you know that today's data is any more unreliable than the data for the last year or more. Maybe today's data is the true data. Prove to me it isn't. Prove to me that PR0 site that you wouldn't buy from yesterday wasn't a PR6 six monhs ago. Google's reporting has been crap for two years. You guys are so gullible it's unbelievable.
Bob, I don't question PR data being crap. I don't necessarily support that position, but I understand things can change for varying reasons and that some buy links to inflate PR, etc. But no one rushes out to buy PR links to get a PR0. It's there because it's new, or it's there because it's penalized. I need not prove whether today's data is, or isn't accurate. My own personal rule is quite simple and it serves my best interests. If you are in the habit of giving your credit card info to new PR0 sites, then more power to you. I could (but I don't) berate you for being so gullible and careless with your credit card information. If a PR6 was suddenly a PR0, then there is no doubt a reason. The decision I make is in my own personal interests, not yours. I'm not trying to convince you to refrain from giving your credit card info to new sites, and I can assure you, you are not convincing me to give my credit information to them. Like I said, if you want to give out your credit card information to any new PR0 site that comes along, you go right ahead.
LMAO! Good point Compar. (o;? Understand G-Tech, Design Agent... but again, PR isn't going to be on my list of concerns in an Internet purchase period. I can understand you exercising a bit more caution and checking the site out more closely if it's PR 0, but... Say a site has a PR 6 - 7, it's been around awhile, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you go to make a purchase! How do you know the same guy owns it today that owned it yesterday? How do you know he had a store on it yesterday? How do you know the SSL is intact today, just because it was there yesterday? How do you know the site isn't hacked today, because it wasn't yesterday? Thus... PR isn't a consideration in my on-line purchases!
Not trying to rub it in guys, simply can't type fast enough to stay ahead of things on the thread here!
Once again all true - still dont see the point in specifically ignoring PR though. Welcome to DP Rocky, I have seen a few of your posts on BOG, have you done your intro yet ?
Rocky, I don't feel it rubbing in at all. Good discussion as far as I'm concerned. You're pointing out though, something I already do; something I've already established I do when ordering in that I check a site out like you, DA and others do. No different than what I said in previous posts and apparently not much different than you and others do with an established site. I've not implied at all, nor would I, that just because a site has a PR6/7 or whatever, that I would just go and make a purchase. As guarded as I am with my own credit card information, I seem to be more cautious with it than others are with theirs. There's always some risk in an online purchase. I choose to minimize that risk. So again, I say, if someone is willing to give their credit card info out to new PR0 sites, more power to them.
How on earth does a thread start about a PR update, and all of a sudden we're talking about whether you shop online based on PR? No wonder it's 29 pages long.
Yes, which is why I said "for some". We all know PR alone is terribly inaccurate and incomplete a measure. However, not showing PR would indeed eliminate the only criteria SOME people use in evaluating link possibilities - thus forcing them to either have to do more evaluation or not have that evaluation at all. I'm merely pointing out that I think from Gg's point of view this helps makes things more difficult/time consuming for those who are 1) lazy and 2) rely heavily on reciprocal linking.
PR is publicity. Even bad publicity on the web is still a backlink (though the anchor text might not be so hot).
This I couldn't agree more with. IMO trying to "trick" a search engines is a losing proposition in the long-run, and rankly just isn't worth my time. SEO is about helping the search engines understand what your site is all about. In just about every situation, I am presented with a client's site that IMO truly isn't "worthy" of ranking well for what they are targeting. As I see it, we then have two options. Option one is to try and fool the engines into thinking its a good site about topic X. Option two is to actually improve the site to the point where it does "deserve" to rank well and get more relevant traffic - from search engines and other sources, by making sure the site is known and exposed to its target market, and by making sure its got loads of great, unique, valueable content. I opt for option two every time. Shoot I spend all day optimizing sites and telling people how PR doesn't impact search results and is essentially meaningless in rankings - yet if I wasn't already familiar with an e-comm site I probably wouldn't order from it either if they had a zero PR. I don't care if they are new - and it certainly doesn't mean there's anything wrong with their site or business... But I, much like every consumer, am not entirely rational. I'd much rather just go find another great site that does have some PR to set my mind at ease and order from them. Honesty or Integrity - okay sure I'm with you there. It certainly does have a correlation with popularity though, albeit much less than a perfect one, to deny any correlation with popularity would be senseless. When applied to an e-commerce site, many people will associated popularity with a certain feeling of trust and faith in the shopping process. It may not be warranted - but that doesn't mean its not true.
so do you have any ideas how google determines good website now? TrustRank? Is that also calculated using BL ? So if you think that PR is gone forever .. Why the SERP is not affected? As we know SERP is affected by PR. I might think that they still keep a copy of old PR themselves to not mess up with the current SERP before them modify the algo of PR and turn it into new name like trustrank. But personally, i like PageRank better. PR PR PR .. TrustRank? Are we goin to call it TR .. Then in the future we will have user screaming "Google TR updates today!" PR is better than TR for the name
Don't have the time to read the entire thread, but maybe Google is just going to come out with a new checksum to thwart the PR checkers and try to keep PR a unique toolbar feature.... dunno. EDIT... Plus my site has a better PR in the Google dir than before.
My guess is that this is neither a glitch, nor the end of PR. It feels like a planned outage. I agree that PR wouldn’t be in Toolbar 3.0 if it were in fact the end of PR. And, I agree that this outage has been going on too long to be a glitch. My guess is that G is doing ‘something’ over this weekend that either requires substantially more processing power than normal, or that requires lower database activity than normal, or perhaps both. That ‘something’ could be as significant as a complete recalculation of internal and public PR after having fixed the 302 issue. That would involve a new snapshot of 8 billion pages and probably a few trillion links, and running maybe 100 iterations of the formula to arrive at a new, more accurate PR. On the other hand, that ‘something’ could be as mundane as a simple but massive database cleanup only. In both examples, you would want to eliminate all non-critical operations. If we consider that every time a page is visited by a machine with an installed toolbar, a request is made to the toolbar server, a database is accessed and the public PR for that page is sent, it seems to me that represents significant processing power and database activity. With some sort of a major internal project, a decision may have been made to shut down public PR temporarily, simply to free system resources