35 replies to this topic

[lmsoren]

For me, it's only a gauge to see how well a page performs overall. And unless it drops unexpectedly :-), it's mostly eyecandy as qwerty points out.

/lmss

[bwelford]

My working assumption at the moment is that PageRank now has a lower weighting in the Google search algorithm than it did some months ago. I base this on the views expressed in other forums that internal web site pages are showing up higher relative to home pages in SERP's.

So conversely, web page content and Title are more important to Google relative to PageRank.

Google takes no account of the keywords metatag and current wisdom seems to be that Google now does not consider the description metatag.

Barry Welford

[Mel]

Don't forget anchor text in URLs, they also have a good deal to do with ranking

[dzinerbear]

I sure wish our community could move away from the Page Rank discussion.

When are we all going to realize that it's meaningless?

I launched a site in the middle of April. Since then, I've launched two others. I hold number one spots for a number of keywords, and all of my sites and all of their pages have PR0.

Traffic to my site doubles every two weeks and sales are increasing.

I'd say that's a whole lot more important that whether I've got a PR0 or PR10.

Put all of that PR worry into building a better site. Ultimately it's the people who go to your site who've already decided it's worth visited, not Google's PR system. Give the people what they're looking for.

Dzinerbear

[bwelford]

I agree heartily, Dzinerbear.

Even more so since you can never know the real PageRank that Google is currently using in its algorithm.

My own suspicion is that the Google Toolbar shows a PageRank that is probably one or two months old, if not older.

Barry Welford

[mcanerin]

Has anyone else noticed this:

"Fix PageRank through proxies - If you are behind a firewall and a proxy server, PageRank may not perform reliably. Use this experimental option only if you are having problems with PageRank not displaying results"

in the help file of the new Google Toolbar? I'm wondering how many of the wierd results people are getting are because of the fact that they have routers/firewalls/etc? Interesting.

Especially since the option is turned off by default, thus not suddenly "fixing" page rank on upgrade. I've just turned the option on and I'll let you know if I notice anything.

Ian