3 ms·

Shut up about PageRank already

26 points by portentint 15y ago

blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
While PageRank might not be all that important to your site, it is important how your site is perceived by others. PR used to be _the_ way to measure the value of a site and that kinda stuck. > I’ve seen folks spend thousands of dollars per month on links or advertising on a site simply because ‘the site has a great PageRank’. Me too, so if you are a site that thrives on advertising or link revenue, PageRank remains very important. Avvo.com said that when their PageRank rises, so do the number of business development calls. Even when PR and business dev calls are not correlated, the perception is still very real. For larger sites having a higher PageRank also means deeper crawls, longer crawls and faster recrawls (I've heard it influence rich snippets and sitelinks too.). Not something to measure like it is the holy grail of marketing, but it is something to keep an eye out for, even if it just to check if you are not ranked 0 (which could mean a serious problem). I wouldn't put my money where my mouth is, if PageRank doesn't matter, I still prefer links from higher PageRank domains. PageRank might be dead, it is not buried yet.
- portentint 15y ago
  I wish it'd get buried, though. I spend half my career explaining the difference between 'true' pagerank and 'toolbar' pagerank.
mattdeboard 15y ago
I'm confused. He says PageRank is useless but then go on to compare it favorably to toolbar PageRank? What does 50% useless mean?
blackboxxx 15y ago
Page Rank is the great red herring that keeps many SEOs busy with unimportant stuff. PR doesn't boost your rankings, doesn't give you more traffic, doesn't convert prospects to buyers... and yet so many people obsess over it. Unless you sell links to people who don't have a clue, PR is useless. And if you are selling these kinds of links, you're probably a spammer, not an SEO.
- bmac27 15y ago
  Agreed. It's become nothing more than another line item to point to clients (or to the C-suite if you're in-house) to say how much progress an SEO campaign has supposedly made. But that's important to a lot of folks, particularly clients who're trying to measure the ROI of SEO efforts in the same manner as their paid program(s). Finding out it has little importance for them would be like finding out Santa Claus isn't real.
devenson 15y ago
The only rank I care about is what our ordinal placement is for a given search term. This can be automated.
- blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
  Too bad that automatic rank checking is not allowed per Google ToS.
  - devenson 15y ago
    Good to know, thanks.
- Travis 15y ago
  I recently installed Piwik (self hosted analytics). In the visitor log, it will show me the ordinal position for that specific visitor. About 50% of my google referrals have this info. I guess sometimes google will send the click position in the referer. This is a useful way of tracking that information, for key phrases that you already receive traffic for.
TuxPirate 15y ago
>Think about that—somewhere in Mountain View, someone’s tweaking the little number you see in the Google toolbar. By hand. How accurate is that gonna be? Certainly more accurate than software failure. Here's the relevant snippet from the source to this claim: >We have a few safety checks in place, so we say like `OH! Did we expect the page rank of MSN.com to be 7 or 8 and then suddenly dropped to 2...' >If those sorts of things happen, then we might get an email and check into it. But for the most part the process runs with very little human intervention. People don't really need to oversee things. The author doesn't show much comprehension of PageRank which is not intended to be a metric solely used for "site ranking" but for crawling rate amongst other things. It's common for lower PR pages to outrank higher PR pages in Google's search results let it be no secret. Can someone remind me the point of this article because it feels like I completely missed it.
- portentint 15y ago
  I know plenty about PageRank, honest. The problem is that Toolbar PageRank has almost zero resemblance to true PageRank. Google isn't using toolbar PR to determine crawling, crawl budget or anything else. And even Google's team says the toolbar data is a bad metric. They only keep it because they know a lot of SEOs would start crying if they got rid of it.
wickedchicken 15y ago
>If you never use the phrases people use to find your products, though, you’re still not going to get found. Do people still think like this? Like it's 1997 and you have to find the right keywords to rank high? What exactly is the purpose of SEO anyway? It's not like cat-v.org uses SEO and that information comes up fine. If you're trying to advertise for a business instead of showing content then you can just... buy ads. Is it for bloggers trying to get pageviews?
ZoFreX 15y ago
I agree with everything in this blog post but I won't be sharing it with anyone. I want to educate people, not berate them - can anyone recommend a similar post, but friendlier?

26 points by portentint 15y ago

While PageRank might not be all that important to your site, it is important how your site is perceived by others. PR used to be _the_ way to measure the value of a site and that kinda stuck. > I’ve seen folks spend thousands of dollars per month on links or advertising on a site simply because ‘the site has a great PageRank’. Me too, so if you are a site that thrives on advertising or link revenue, PageRank remains very important. Avvo.com said that when their PageRank rises, so do the number of business development calls. Even when PR and business dev calls are not correlated, the perception is still very real. For larger sites having a higher PageRank also means deeper crawls, longer crawls and faster recrawls (I've heard it influence rich snippets and sitelinks too.). Not something to measure like it is the holy grail of marketing, but it is something to keep an eye out for, even if it just to check if you are not ranked 0 (which could mean a serious problem). I wouldn't put my money where my mouth is, if PageRank doesn't matter, I still prefer links from higher PageRank domains. PageRank might be dead, it is not buried yet.

portentint 15y ago
I wish it'd get buried, though. I spend half my career explaining the difference between 'true' pagerank and 'toolbar' pagerank.

mattdeboard 15y ago

I'm confused. He says PageRank is useless but then go on to compare it favorably to toolbar PageRank? What does 50% useless mean?

blackboxxx 15y ago

Page Rank is the great red herring that keeps many SEOs busy with unimportant stuff. PR doesn't boost your rankings, doesn't give you more traffic, doesn't convert prospects to buyers... and yet so many people obsess over it. Unless you sell links to people who don't have a clue, PR is useless. And if you are selling these kinds of links, you're probably a spammer, not an SEO.

bmac27 15y ago
Agreed. It's become nothing more than another line item to point to clients (or to the C-suite if you're in-house) to say how much progress an SEO campaign has supposedly made. But that's important to a lot of folks, particularly clients who're trying to measure the ROI of SEO efforts in the same manner as their paid program(s). Finding out it has little importance for them would be like finding out Santa Claus isn't real.

devenson 15y ago

The only rank I care about is what our ordinal placement is for a given search term. This can be automated.

blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
Too bad that automatic rank checking is not allowed per Google ToS.
- devenson 15y ago
  Good to know, thanks.
Travis 15y ago
I recently installed Piwik (self hosted analytics). In the visitor log, it will show me the ordinal position for that specific visitor. About 50% of my google referrals have this info. I guess sometimes google will send the click position in the referer. This is a useful way of tracking that information, for key phrases that you already receive traffic for.

TuxPirate 15y ago

>Think about that—somewhere in Mountain View, someone’s tweaking the little number you see in the Google toolbar. By hand. How accurate is that gonna be? Certainly more accurate than software failure. Here's the relevant snippet from the source to this claim: >We have a few safety checks in place, so we say like `OH! Did we expect the page rank of MSN.com to be 7 or 8 and then suddenly dropped to 2...' >If those sorts of things happen, then we might get an email and check into it. But for the most part the process runs with very little human intervention. People don't really need to oversee things. The author doesn't show much comprehension of PageRank which is not intended to be a metric solely used for "site ranking" but for crawling rate amongst other things. It's common for lower PR pages to outrank higher PR pages in Google's search results let it be no secret. Can someone remind me the point of this article because it feels like I completely missed it.

portentint 15y ago
I know plenty about PageRank, honest. The problem is that Toolbar PageRank has almost zero resemblance to true PageRank. Google isn't using toolbar PR to determine crawling, crawl budget or anything else. And even Google's team says the toolbar data is a bad metric. They only keep it because they know a lot of SEOs would start crying if they got rid of it.

wickedchicken 15y ago

>If you never use the phrases people use to find your products, though, you’re still not going to get found. Do people still think like this? Like it's 1997 and you have to find the right keywords to rank high? What exactly is the purpose of SEO anyway? It's not like cat-v.org uses SEO and that information comes up fine. If you're trying to advertise for a business instead of showing content then you can just... buy ads. Is it for bloggers trying to get pageviews?

ZoFreX 15y ago

I agree with everything in this blog post but I won't be sharing it with anyone. I want to educate people, not berate them - can anyone recommend a similar post, but friendlier?