39 replies to this topic

[Incognito]

Think of it this way.

Google according to everything is only 1 of the 100 factors.

In a hockey team there are 30 players.

Take the goalie out of the game. He's only one player numerically speaking. value wise, he/she is everything. No matter what you do you will never be a winner or even close.

However in a little tyke league game the goalie probably wouldn't make a difference and you could probably do pretty good without one.

In Junior, Rep or even NHL your a joke, you won't be seen.

How can you possibly fanthom the idea that the technology that made google is some tiny little factor? In a business sense it would be best to deny that Pagerank actually does anything. You really have not though this through.

[anthonyparsons.com]

Incognito, here we go. Your theory vs. my knowledge and experience. Links make PR? Correct? So, please explain your theory to me about these Top 10 rankings for "web hosting" vs. their link popularity (PR).

I have removed the websites themselves.

1. 5,452,886 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

2. 1,949,242 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

3. 10,046 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

4. 42,404 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

5. 262,043 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

6. 1,118,558 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

7. 222,107 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org doesn't seem to link to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

8. 24,959 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

9. 29,710 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com links to this domain

10. 12,943,952 web pages found that link to this domain, dmoz.org links to this domain, Yahoo.com doesn't seem to link to this domain

Think about those results, take particular notice of #3 and #10. ???????? bells are ringing here "Incognito"

[Incognito]

What is your point here?

You've just shown how PR works now. LOL


Beside all those websites you listed put their PR and tell me your point once more.

[Incognito]

Ok to further prove the fact that PR is important. Tell me how many times "web hosting" is in the page for Netfirms.com, #1 for web hosting?

The netfirms page is ALL images, with alt tags in them. You're telling me that because google liked alt tags so much it became number one? Or maybe its the fact that its PR IS 8 with over 18,000 pages LINKING to it AKA PageRank.

[anthonyparsons.com]

Mate, my point is, and I will say it again, PR has nothing to do with ranking. #7 has a PR7 with 222,000 links, #10 has a PR 8 with nearly 13 million links. Why isn't #10 ranked above #7 if PR has anything to do with ranking.

That is my point. I will say it again, as I and the other "professionals with knowledge and experience" have said, and I state, PageRank (PR) has nothing to do with actual ranking. It is one (1) part of 100's utilised to rank a website.

[McFox]

Well I am glad that is clear then

Seriously, I can see the point here.

If the keywords / keyphrases are not that highly competitive, Pagerank does not really matter, so this explains why I (and others) can land a webpage in the top 10 - 20 for a search result with a Pagerank of 0 (www.stdinfo.com) If you search Google for the term, std info, my site comes in about #20 or so from around 1.1 million results. (In case you are wondering, the term "std info", returns a count on Wordtracker of around 140 over 3 months)

On the other hand, if I were to search for health, a very competitive word, a check on the number of inbound links returns 89,300 pages linking to National Institutes of Health (NIH).

My own conclusion from all of this?
Pagerank is nice if you have it.

McFox

[mcanerin]

Now, waitaminit...

PR *IS* important - or rather, what it is measuring is. PR itself is just a way to measure Popularity/Authority, which IS important to most SE's. Whether PR itself does the job well is almost secondary. It's certainly not going to go away, and shouldn't be denigrated.

Let me ask you this - look at every single post in this thread and others, and mentally switch the term "PR" with authority and you will see something. Everyone who is telling you that PR is a good thing will also make perfect sense when they tell you Authority is. People who are not making any sense at all when you switch the two are probably taking about the obsession with the little green bar, and NOT what PR is supposed to be measuring.

When you do this mental switch, you will also notice that even though a P*rn site might have a high PR, it would not be an Authority for a home builder, for example. It would be an Authority for others in it's area though. This is a failing of PR.

Now there are many sites that are not an authority on anything in and of themselves (ie low PR sites) but nonetheless make up part of the "authority of the masses" - which is to say, if everyone likes a site, it must be doing something right even if the SE can't figure it out.

In order to simulate the difference between Authority sites and the authority of the masses, Google assigns a Page Rank that has a sliding scale of influence. Low PR sites are of the "masses" variety (ie you need a lot of them to make a difference) and high PR sites are of the Authority site variety (even just one can make a difference). This works pretty well, and does it automatically.

You could also do it by simply counting links (masses) and then assigning a different variable to certain "hubs". Or only count links in certain "themes" or many other ways. The point is that they are all trying to deal with the concept of authority or popularity. Perhaps the "authority of the masses" could be described as "popularity" and the centers of hubs chould be considered "Authority sites" or whatever.

PR attempts to combine the two, and maybe they shouldn't do that.

Stopping here. Stay tuned for part two.

Ian

[mcanerin]

Ok, part 2,

When you do a search for something, Google goes out and looks for sites that match the terms the closest. It will then sort those based on how close it is. For example, on a search for "red shirts" it will sort those sites that specifically say "red shirts" ahead of sites that say"shirts red" and over sites that say "red blah blah shirts" and sites that say "shirts blah blah red"

Once it has this list - basically, relevant sites - then it tries to figure out which ones are the most relevant, and this is where all the magic happens. You run these through filters that take out duplicates, spam sites and sites that no one thinks are useful. Then you re-sort according to how popular the sites are (PR).

One of the interesting things about Florida/Gladys seems to be another sorting (or an altered popularity sort) that tries to sort first by popularity and then by authority, resulting in some low backlink / high authority sites showing up in positions where there used to only be high popularity sites.

Bottom line? PR is a waste of time. But making your site popular and authoritative is not, and never has been.

My opinion, of course

Ian

[anthonyparsons.com]

I should off done this from my first post in this topic.

Quote Google

Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only information we make available to the public about our ranking system.

http://www.google.co...bmasters/4.html

[OldWelshGuy]

IMO PR as we have come to know it, is on the wane, to be replaced by a much smarter beastie. PR is controlled on a logarithmic scale, as I understand it this means that it is not absolute it is relative to other things.

PR is important, and it looks like Google is saying that 'links' are not important, 'on topic' links ARE. The stuff that G has brought into play totally changes the power of links, I have noticed that many of the sites bouncing around tend to be those with many links, whereas the ones that have good on page SEO, and a selected few quality on topic links seem only to be moving slightly.

Seems to me like google is trying to get back to its roots