Ask Marketing Experts search engine marketing forum

[7thDsites]

As many of you are probably aware the theories of Google PageRank and it's value, whereas links back to your site are concerned, have been widely speculated upon for quite a long time...

One 'school' would have you think that it's the magical golden ticket to higher rankings, then certainly there are the middle of the roaders, and the other 'school' which claim it doesn't matter at all.

I've always been slightly middle of the road and have claimed on many occassions that 'it's not a bad thing to keep in mind but not to discount a link partner because they have low PR'. Ultimately the key to valued linking lies within keeping the links related to your site, etc, etc... (I don't wan't to stray from topic here)

Well for some time now, through my work with LinkageXpress.com, we've known with a great deal of certainty that PageRank had little to do with how one placed in the search results for desired terms. Because the general e-populous believed that it had value we would, and do, play along and seek only sites with higher PR, or those that we deem as going to have higher PR... of course to 'play along' was not our only motivation here as we felt that PR could again matter at some point in the future... yes, at one point it was somewhat important but this changed as linking, moreso wrongfully done linking, became extremely mainstream ultimately skewing the results and values.

For well over a year now you could easily find sites with the dreaded Zero PageRank, which is not a penalization I might add but generally indicitive of the fact that google hadn't yet found or is not seeing any links back to the site, in number #1 positions for search terms... and many people ranked below this PR Zero'd site with higher PR. This just a little reinforcing tidbit about why it doesn't necessarily matter. Some of this, it would appear, has changed a bit though within the last month and for some of the more highly competitive terms you'll not find sites listed in the top 5 for 'search phrase' that have PR less than 5... hmmmm - mind you I only checked about a dozen of the VERY competitive search phrases and outside of these you can still find PR0'd sites in the top 5... again; it doesn't necessarily matter.

Finally... to the reason I started writing this; if you now visit the Google page about the toolbar - http://toolbar.google.com/ you'll see that they have REMOVED the PageRank bar from the highlighted list of features and the Screenshot image; Well now isn't this interesting!!

OK - so what does this mean? Well, Google only knows, but I would say that it's one of a couple of things...
1) that because values became so skewed they were forced into lessening, or dismissing the value of PageRank, so they'll just lop it off the bar.
2) They'll retain PR and the PR will simply not be made available to the public i.e. visible on the toolbar. Hidden PageRank... that'll add to SEO confusion! lol - This would potentially restore some value to it though.
3) or last speculation; that now that they are in the business of making serious money, which thanks to the stockholders propegates greed, they're thinking of one of the above mentioned reasons and clearing some space to feed you some ads or drive you into clicking on some adwords...

How's that for some food for thought?


Best regards,
john

[admin]

well said John. I have been downplaying Google PageRank to my clients for quite some time. I get many link requests to trade only on "pages of equal or better PR".

One of the biggest issues i have with PR is that it is months out of date. The results in the little green bar could be from last year - no one knows how often it is updated.

Next, as you point out, all that needs to be done is look at placement. If a website has a good ranking, its worth visiting/linking to/referring.

[maartenvr]

Yeah PR is sure out of date most of the time. I think there must be 3 months between updates now.

It is unbelievable how many people still trade links just for PR sake. I heard one guy even say that he did not want someone with a PR0 linking to his website because it could hurt his rankings. I find that totally ridiculous. Lots of people only want to do a link trade if you have the same PR or higher they have... I wonder how ling this will continue....

[admin]

The fact that Google is now downplaying their own PR meter is very significant. It could mean that their little "public experiment" has run its course, and like advertising in email, has become abused to the point of uselessness. It could also mean that G now has a new formula/algorighm for ranking websites, and PageRank is like DOS - obsolete and unused.

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