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View Full Version : Google downplays the importance of Page Rank, yet again. Is the end near ?



Harold Mansfield
10-21-2009, 11:02 PM
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)”

Something most of us have known and moved on from a while ago, but it's always nice to have it confirmed that chasing Page Rank is like chasing your tail.

Link:
http://redfoxseo.com/2009/10/google-pagerank-is-the-end-almost-near/ (http://redfoxseo.com/2009/10/google-pagerank-is-the-end-almost-near/)

billbenson
10-22-2009, 01:19 AM
Most webmasters on the webmaster forums I frequent pretty much dropped it when recip linking went out of favor. A lot of webmasters used it as a basis for who to exchange links with. Today, most seem to look at SERPS, spammy pages on sites, age, and other factors to determine a sites credibility. Most don't have the toolbar installed anymore either. I have no idea what my sites PR is.

Harold Mansfield
10-22-2009, 01:57 AM
I have no idea what my sites PR is.

Neither do I. There was a time I was waiting for the next update to see how a fared, like a kid waiting for acceptance from the cool kids at school.

I still see people using it as a basis to buy domains and websites, even had a guy who wanted a site making a certain amount in revenue a month, turn me down saying that the PR wasn't good enough, even though the revenue was there (he wanted at least a PR 4 and $100 a month). Never understood that one.

vangogh
10-22-2009, 03:16 AM
People focused on PR because at one time it was that important and also because it's one of the few (albeit flawed) metrics we get. SEOs have been wanting it to disappear for years.

Google recently dropped mention of it in Webmaster Tools though they still show the green in the toolbar. Unfortunately for Google PageRank has been part of their branding so I think they've been hesitant to remove all traces of it due to marketing.

I couldn't tell you what my PR is either. I do have a toolbar that shows it for sites, but I never pay attention to it. The toolbar has other things I use. PR can be a way to make a quick snap judgement about something. You're probably safe in saying that PR 9 site is going to ran better than the PR 2 site next to it, but even that isn't necessarily true.

Hopefully it will just go away. Of course once it does people will just flock to companies that put out their own metrics like SEOmoz's mozrank. People want easy information and a simple ranking system fits that easy information even if the info isn't accurate.

justifystudios
10-22-2009, 06:20 PM
We don't even bother with Meta Tags anymore after Google announced they don't bother looking at them anyway. We figure if it doesn't get us a little more Google Juice, why bother?

<please set up signature>

vangogh
10-22-2009, 06:27 PM
I'm not really sure what meta tags have to do with this thread. Last time I checked the thread was about Google downplaying PageRank, perhaps to do away with it publicly once and for all.

Spider
10-26-2009, 09:56 AM
Not everyone agrees with you guys about PageRank --

Does Google PageRank Count Anymore? (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/Does-Google-PageRank-Count-Anymore.html)

The main points of this article, it seems to me, were that

1. most people still consider it important which means the people you want to reach consider it important, therefore it is important. IOW what is important to your customers should be important to you.

2. Google is playing it down because it is the basic measure in selling links, which Google has been fighting for years. Remove PageRank and you remove the basis for selling links. But, because links are still being sold, PageRank is still important.

3. Google confirms that PR is still in effect but is only 1 of about 200 parameters that are considered. That says, if everything is equal, pagerank will make the difference between being #1 and being #2, or between being on page 1 or being on page 2 - a tremendous importance if you are selling goods or services through your website.

Sounds like convincing arguments to me. And because I do not trust Google, I wouldn't believe that PR is unmportant just because they say so.

billbenson
10-26-2009, 11:50 AM
I could see someone hiring someone for SEO using PR as a metric. Someone uninformed. Think about it Spider. Do you want good PR or to come up 1 in a Google Search? If its your own site, you can look at your statistics to see what your best search terms are. You can track improvement in quality traffic.

If a potential customer of Vangoghs is reviewing VG's web site or any example sites he has, he should be looking at page placement in the serps, number of pages cached, etc. It is only the uninformed client that would look at PR.

You are right, however, there are a lot of uninformed clients.

Unlike VG, you are unlikely to have any prospects look at your PR. He sells SEO and you sell yourself as a business coach. Generally speaking, only someone who knows something about web design or SEO is actually going to know what it is.

One other thing. If you do a good job of SEO on your site, your PR will naturally rise anyway.

I've been selling on my site for about 5 years or more. I get about 35 calls on a good day and 15 on a bad day in conjunction with a ton of emails. Never have I had a customer mention my sites PR. I've had plenty of complaints about the site, just not about PR. I honestly don't think PR has affected me in any way on the site. I have never tried to trade links, so I suspect the PR is 1 or 2. I haven't checked in a long time.

vangogh
10-26-2009, 11:51 AM
Frederick there are two types of PR. The one Google uses behind the scenes and what shows as green in the Google toolbar as well as a couple of other toolbars. Toolbar PR (TBPR) is on a different scale than what's behind the scenes and is also usually out of date since it's only updated every few months, whereas real PR, the behind the scenes one is updated all the time.

No one is saying that Google doesn't use real PR. It was the basis of everything they did and is still likely used for a lot of things. While it's 1 of hundreds of factors it's likely weighted more than other factors.

The problem with it is that people think it's the end all and be all of seo sometimes and so they focus on doing everything they can to raise their PR instead of focusing on getting actual traffic.


1. most people still consider it important which means the people you want to reach consider it important, therefore it is important. IOW what is important to your customers should be important to you.

Take PR away and this point is irrelevant. If people can't see it in the toolbar then they can't judge your site or business based on it. Also most typical customers do not consider it important. They don't even know what it is. Unless you were looking for SEO services when was the last time you visited a site looked at the PR of the site and decided to buy or not based on that PR? I'm going to guess never.


2. Google is playing it down because it is the basic measure in selling links, which Google has been fighting for years. Remove PageRank and you remove the basis for selling links. But, because links are still being sold, PageRank is still important.

Again it's an artificial measure. People do buy and sell links for a variety of reasons, not just PR. A link is effectively advertising online. Link selling and buying existed before Google and it will exist after. Because Google places a high value on links a market for buying and selling links evolved with the purpose of manipulating search results. Google didn't care for what they consider artificial linking and has tried to discourage the practice. Removing PR effectively kills the market. People will still buy and still links, of course, and people will still engage in link sales to affect ranking in Google. Removing the TBPR means people can't sell links based on what TBPR a page/site has.


3. Google confirms that PR is still in effect but is only 1 of about 200 parameters that are considered. That says, if everything is equal, pagerank will make the difference between being #1 and being #2, or between being on page 1 or being on page 2 - a tremendous importance if you are selling goods or services through your website.

I mentioned it above. No one is questioning that Google uses PR, but again there's a difference in real PR and TBPR and too many people focus solely on the latter as if that's all they need to do to pull a lot of traffic into a site. TBPR can and is manipulated and over the years Google has reduced the importance of PR in general in its system of algorithms.

Some people simply focus everything on PR to the exclusion of everything else, which isn't a good thing. You can look around the web and see people willing to trade links, but only if your PR is above a certain amount. Many SEOs have been wishing TBPR would go away for years since it's not really showing what people think it's showing.

All that's going on now is Google dropping PR reporting from inside Webmaster Tools. TBPR still exists, though this seems like a step in the direction of removing it as well.


And because I do not trust Google, I wouldn't believe that PR is unmportant just because they say so.

Just don't let your mistrust cause you to automatically assume everything they say is a lie. Google doesn't always tell 100&#37; of the truth, but many things they say are pretty much how things are. I'm not telling you to trust them, but don't let the mistrust cloud decisions. Question things, but don't automatically assume they aren't telling the truth.

Spider
10-26-2009, 02:43 PM
Okay. Just thought you'd all like to hear another view.

Conversation is like a boat - if everyone gets on the same side, it sinks!

Harold Mansfield
10-26-2009, 03:16 PM
Not everyone agrees with you guys about PageRank --

Does Google PageRank Count Anymore? (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/Does-Google-PageRank-Count-Anymore.html)

The main points of this article, it seems to me, were that

1. most people still consider it important which means the people you want to reach consider it important, therefore it is important. IOW what is important to your customers should be important to you.


Unless you are doing SEO work, your customers have no idea what the PR of your site is. Yes, you will get more clicks if you are at the top of the serps, but you don't need a high PR to rank well in the serps.

PR has become an industry all it's own that targets people who use it as a measure of a successful website. The measure of a successful website is does it attract clients ?, or does it make money?, and neither Google nor Alexa has a measure to accurately portray that.

I have a PR 1 website that has never gone about PR 1, yet it brings in a consistent $300 a month and I never touch it.
I have other sites that have a higher PR and don't make squat. Is the PR the reason they don't make any money? No. It's the sites. They suck and I know it, I just haven't gotten around to redoing them yet.

The only people that even know what PR is, are people that webmaster their own sites, or provide some sort of web service. IOW, us. Clients bring it up only because that is the only metric that they have ever heard of and assume that is what makes a site successful...they have no idea what it's all about, or what it means.

To see the difference, look at "Buy and Sell" forums. Experienced web people looking to buy websites are asking how much consistent money it makes. That's all they care about. Novices will ask what the PR it is and they get ripped off all the time.

A PR 5 website that doesn't make a dime, is only worth what links you can sell to other novices that think PR is the end all be all of web existence....other than that, it's pretty worthless (unless the domain is worth something).

PR is a highly inaccurate measure because for the most part (for 99&#37; of the websites online), it's all about manipulation. That's why Google is getting away from it. A high PR doesn't mean that your site is the best, it just means that you have done a better job of manipulating it's appearance in the SERP's..but not necessarily it's positioning for the your target keywords.

And this is how the industry of PR has flourished. People have been so involved with that little bar as a measure of success that they have been neglecting what really makes a website successful, and they have been getting nice PR, and still not making any money. Up until now the scam has been to create a website or blog in seemingly one niche, but optimize it for a lesser competitive keyword or phrase (that may or may not have anything to do with it) and getting the PR..and then selling the site based on the PR alone. It's a big rip off.

If you ever get a website appraised, PR is one factor that they will consider as an extra added bonus, but first and foremost will be design, content, domain, traffic, money and age.

Which is worth more...(without risking a Google ban by selling links) A PR2 website that makes $500 a month ? Or..A PR6 website that makes $100 a month ?
I am not saying that it is not important...you should optimize you site to place as well as you can for your targeted industry, niche, or keywords/phrases, but what number you get on the green bar should not be the concern, where you place in the SERP's should and they are not always the same thing.

vangogh
10-26-2009, 04:35 PM
Just thought you'd all like to hear another view.

Another point of view is always good. Sorry if it came across like I didn't want to hear one. It was more than I wanted to counter the view of the article.

PageRank is one of those things that gets misunderstood far too often. Some people think it means the actual rank of your page in the search results, which it doesn't. PR is really a branding thing for Google at this point. Within certain circles you say PR and people think Google. The idea behind it is why Google did have much better results when it started compared to the other search engines at the time.

Today though I think it causes more confusion than it provides useful information. I don't think it's completely going away, but anytime Google is willing to give some information or send a signal it's at the very least interesting.

Spider
10-26-2009, 06:49 PM
...The only people that even know what PR is, are people that webmaster their own sites, or provide some sort of web service. IOW, us. ....Maybe, but anyone who has a Google toolbar can see it. Just last evening I looked at my wife's computer and asked what all that clutter was at the top of her browser. She had a Yahoo toolbar, a Google Toolbar and three other toolbars. And no idea how she got them! And there was the Google green bar sitting in the middle of all that rubbish.


Another point of view is always good. Sorry if it came across like I didn't want to hear one....Not at all.

vangogh
10-26-2009, 08:22 PM
Those toolbars sometimes come with other things you download. One may have been installed by default and the others may have gotten installed along they way, probably by agreeing to something when visiting a site. I'm sure both Google and Yahoo will offer to install their toolbars for your convenience when you download most anything from them.

I have a few toolbars installed. Some are useful. They all stay hidden until I want to use them. They take up way too much screen real estate. I never use the Google or Yahoo toolbars.

With the PR in the Google toolbar you do have to activate it before it will show. The default for the toolbar is to not show it unless you allow the advanced options. Though I guess you can can easily allow the advanced options by clicking through something when you're clicking through to accidentally install the toolbar in the first place. :)

I would think the average web user wouldn't know what PageRank is even if they have the toolbar installed. You see it, but you're on the savvy side of the tech curve. I guess you could ask your wife if she knows what PR or PageRank is and see what she says. Might be an interesting test.

Spider
11-17-2009, 04:45 PM
Reviving an old thread because I have a question about PageRank.

I discovered last evening that my main (FrederickPearce) website is PR5. My old website, before I sold it, was PR6, but that was not uncommon back then. Nowadays, it seems higher PRs are more difficult to achieve, so PR5 gave me a little ego-boost.

Then I remembered you'all saying how unimportant it is now that Google have said it is unimportant (but still have it in place.) I've also read a few articles that say to ignore Google, they have their own reasons for trying to downplay the importance, PR is still important.

Well, that's all very well, but now that I have PR5, what good is it to me? How can I benefit from it? What can I do to maximise this great achievement(?!)

Also, and more importantly, I am in the process of making some changes to the the site (none of the changes are uploaded yet) and I immediately wonder if I should change anythig after all.

What do you'all think?

billbenson
11-17-2009, 06:21 PM
Since some webmasters (naive ones IMO) still consider it important, you could use it for link trades with them. Find some appropriate sites and ask for content link exchanges for a PR5 page.

After that, edit the page as you see fit keeping in mind SEO. Other than link trades, PR doesn't matter to you, how well you place in the SERPS does. Thats what most people looking for trades will look at anyway. If you are monitoring your site, look at SERPS placement first ALWAYS.

Oh, if you do link trades, take a hard look at the site you want to link to you for G placement, spammy pages etc. You don't want links from sites G doesn't like.

vangogh
11-17-2009, 07:20 PM
Frederick, there are two kinds of PageRank. One is used internally by Google and affects some of their algorithms. For example Matt Cutts has mentioned in the past that pages/sites with higher PageRank will get crawled deeper and more often. Once upon a time PR was a very large factor in the ranking algorithms, but over time it's been lessened as a factor.

The PR we all see is Toolbar PageRank (TBPR). It's a snapshot of what your PR was on the day the data was pushed to the toolbar. It's likely on a different scale (real PR is probably not 1-10). The problem with TBPR is that people place too much emphasis on it as though the key to the Google kingdom was to raise their TBPR. People go out and do anything they can to raise TBPR as though it was the end goal of everything to success.

Unfortunately people who don't spend their day in the world of SEO grab onto that and it just causes a lot of confusion for people who chase after something they don't need to be chasing.

What can you do with your TBPR? You can take advantage of someone who thinks it's important. That's pretty much it. TBPR is not an asset. It's a metric. It's a measure of what something might have looked like at a moment in time. It's not something you need to do anything with.

As far as making changes to your site it depends what kind of changes. Changing things on your page will have 0 effect on PR. PR is based 100&#37; on links and nothing else. Making changes to your site could affect where those pages rank for various queries. Changes could improve your ranking they could hurt your ranking. I wouldn't worry too much about it If you have a good reason for making changes then make those changes. If you're nervous about the changes affecting how much search traffic your pages get, save a copy of the page now so you can put it back later.

The one change you want to be careful about is changing URLs. A new URL loses all the links pointing to the original. That includes a change from index.html to index.php. That will create a completely new URL. You can change URLs, but you need to use redirection to transfer any search benefit from the old one to the new one.

Spider
11-18-2009, 05:18 PM
Not much to do, it seems, beyond what I am already doing. Thanks you for your comments.

MrGamma
01-09-2010, 12:19 AM
Something most of us have known and moved on from a while ago, but it's always nice to have it confirmed that chasing Page Rank is like chasing your tail.

They are not downplaying it... It's actually not that important. I tend to believe it does more damage than good. It can give a worthless site the appearance that it has traffic when it simply doesn't and it can give profitable websites the appearance that they are worthless. In the end, it gives people a way to gauge the value of a website without really thinking about it. For the better or for the worse... does it really matter?

Jmo...

In any event, for those of us who can understand what it might or might not be telling us about a website, is that justification to hype it to the point where it loses all meaning?

vangogh
01-10-2010, 12:53 PM
You might be right about it causing more damage than good. PageRank seems like a simple thing, but so many people are confused about what it really is and what it means. I don't think Google is going to completely drop it from the toolbar any time soon though, because they've branded PR as part of the algorithm. I think they keep it around more for marketing purposes at this point than for any useful info it delivers.

By the way welcome back to the community James. I hadn't realized it was you until I clicked on the link in your signature.

dpdumas642
01-11-2010, 11:27 AM
I have noticed that some of the keywords that I am currently working on getting ranked for that the website is on top for the organic search results shows that the page rank is NA. I also have seen similar results further down the page, a site with a page rank of 1 is showing higher on the page than a site with a page rank of 2. So obviously Google doesn't put as much importance on page rank as they used to.

KristineS
01-11-2010, 01:11 PM
I've seen the same thing. I did a little research on the competitors for some of our keywords for one of our companies. Sites with PR of 2 or even 1 were ranking higher than us. Given that evidence, I'd have to agree that Google isn't placing as much evidence on page rank as it used to do.

billbenson
01-11-2010, 01:23 PM
Ya, but the PR bar is notoriously inaccurate. If you are using that as a gage, it's pretty meaningless.

KristineS
01-12-2010, 12:36 PM
I wasn't using that. I was using a site dedicated to PR checking. Don't know if it is more accurate, but would have to suspect it is.

billbenson
01-12-2010, 02:04 PM
I would tend to doubt it. According to VG there is the internal PR which is used in their algorithm and the publically available one. The publicly available one has long been know to vary, be updated late, and inaccurate. I doubt any source for the public one is accurate or dependable from any source.

vangogh
01-13-2010, 11:18 AM
I think those PR checkers look at the PR of a web page across all the different Google data centers and then average the values. That's how they used to work. It's still the toolbar PR they're measuring so it's not likely that much more accurate than using the actual toolbar. No one outside Google has access to the internal PR they use in the algorithms.