14 replies to this topic

[SpamHelp]

I don't know if this sounds normal to any or most of you, but I haven't personally encountered it before. So I've put up a page at www.spamhelp.org/appliances/. The absolute ideal search term for this page would be "spam appliances".

Now Google ranks this page 1st in its listings - actually, it's started off in 1st place and never went down (quite surprising for me).

So, even though it's ranked 1st, the PR is really low, a nice roundy 0/10.

I admit it, I too was bitten by the PR bug, but this example is healing me. Of course, I'm not fully healed. I still think it's good to have a high PR - not really for SERP but more for looking good with your visitors. Most people look at PR as if it's a vote on how good a site is. If they're under the impression that your site will suck, it is not always easy to prove otherwise to them.

Edited by Jill, 28 October 2003 - 01:37 PM.

[OldWelshGuy]

I might get shot down in flames here, but i understand that the PR displayed in the Gtoolbar is NOT the pages actual PR.. someone confirm or deny this please

[SpamHelp]

I might get shot down in flames here, but i understand that the PR displayed in the Gtoolbar is NOT the pages actual PR.. someone confirm or deny this please

Well, I was referring to the shown PR, which is what people are obsessed about.

[qwerty]

Toolbar PR is an estimate, rounded to the nearest whole number. On top of that, the toolbar is kind of buggy when it comes to displaying PR.

But the only other way I know of for checking PR is to look in Google's directory, and while I suppose we can assume that source isn't buggy, you have to rely on just your own estimate to get the value -- mousing over the display doesn't give you a tip.

[OldWelshGuy]

Cheers Bob, Sh i also have pages that appear higher up the SERPs than pages with higher pr, I can never work it out either.

I am just happy to have a page appear where it does, I go with the Italian style of driving where they dont use the rear view mirror, as whats behind you dont matter lol.

[qwerty]

Actually, just last week I did something that I guess one could say indicated that I considered PR relevant, but only because somebody else brought it up. I got a link request from a site that mentioned that they had a PR of 4 or 5, so according to them, a link trade between our sites would be good for both of us.

So, I took a look, and their home page was at 4 or 5, but the links page was a 0. I pointed that out to them, and they were very apologetic -- they even took my advice on changing the anchor text for the home page's link to the links page.

And yes, I did approve the link. It's a pretty new site, and it's got potential.

[Jill]

Spamhelp, it takes a good 4 - 6 weeks for most pages to show a "real" toolbar PageRank.

Jill

[SpamHelp]

Spamhelp, it takes a good 4 - 6 weeks for most pages to show a "real" toolbar PageRank.

Jill

I see ... it was indexed on 3rd October.

[Ron Carnell]

Toolbar PR is an estimate, rounded to the nearest whole number.

Erratic at TBPR seems to be these days, I think the estimate is truncated rather than rounded.

The Google Directory, already mentioned, displays PR on a different scale than does the Toolbar, from 0 to 7 instead of 0 to 10. Do a "View Source" on a directory page, and the width of the graphic used to depict PR will tell you, without any quesstimating, what your PR is. A maximum PR of 7 is 40 pixels, so a PR of 11 pixels is equivalent to a PR of 2.

Layout two "lines" of identical length, one divided into seven equal portions and the other into ten, and you can see where your PR rests on each line. Where the segments overlap can sometimes offer a finer granularity than is available will either tool alone.

As an example off the top of my head (and I haven't looked at this in at least a year), let's say that a Directory PR of 4 spans part of the TBPR 5 and most of 6. Ergo, if the Toolbar gives you a PR of 5 and the Directory gives you a PR of 4, you can conclude you are a HIGH 5. My investigations with this is what convinced me the TBPR was an integer reflection of PageRank, rather than one that was rounded to an integer.

[compar]

Most people look at PR as if it's a vote on how good a site is. If they're under the impression that your site will suck, it is not always easy to prove otherwise to them.

I think "most people" don't even know what Page Rank is. And I'm sure that "most people" don't have the Google toolbar loaded as part of their browser. So if you are worried about real visitors I don't think you need to be. Unless what you are really worried about is the subset of visitors who are SEO practitioners.

[Peter]

A high rank on a low PR page is not strange,.. and perhaps now everybody can believe that PR does not have that much influence,..

If you want to know more about PageRank or specifically real pagerank,. then just do a search in Google on: real pagerank

I like that search for the simple reason that it is an article in my web site that ranks number 1 for that search and that page has a PR of 0!!!

Oops,.. it has a PR of 2 now,... but just a couple of days ago it still was 0 and ranked number 1 as well.

Anyway,.. pagerank just tells you how many friends you have, which you can get just by putting up good content.

hmm,.. It also seems like something is going on at Google,.. Many pages are gaining PR in my site and I saw the same happening in one of my customers site.

Peter

[BrianR]

The Google Directory, already mentioned, displays PR on a different scale than does the Toolbar, from 0 to 7 instead of 0 to 10.

Thanks, Ron - I didn't know that - I'd always assumed they both used the same scale (the curse of assumption strikes again!).

Come to think of it, it's a bit crazy that G should use two different page rank scales like that - it's rather confusing for us non-mathematical types!

BrianR

[qwerty]

That's true. In a competitive situation, every aspect of the algo becomes more important. You need to get every little boost you can. And the one thing that sets PR (or more generally, backlinks) apart from the other aspects is that it can continue to grow after you've reached a point where changing things on the page would make it look spammy.

But I personally would only concentrate on that aspect by trying to gain more backlinks. I don't like this strategy of hiding links (internal and external) in scripts.

[compar]

I don't like this strategy of hiding links (internal and external) in scripts.

Qwerty,

Nobody has suggested that on this thread I don't believe. Did you just throw it in as an afterthought or are you making some specific point?

[qwerty]

My point is that, once you find yourself in a situation competitive enough that everything, including PR, becomes important, I still would not go so far as to use scripting to hide my links from search engines in an effort to boost PR, or get the SE to treat a reciprocal link as if it were inbound only.

No one had mentioned that in this thread. I just wanted to indicate that my personal opinion is that such practices are deceptive, and there is a limit to how far I'll go to boost a page's rank, even in a highly-competitive situation. If I've optimized everything on the page as much as I can, gotten a ton of backlinks, and I'm still not ranking well, I've done all I'm willing to do.