Google Will Kill PageRank
Posted on October 27th, 2007. 8 Comments so far. You next?
So by now it’s reasonably official that Google have rolled their seemingly long overdue toolbar PR update. Many saw significant drops, including some of the biggest names in blogging, namely for the apparently heinous act of selling links.
Many have said the PR system is dieing and has been for a long time, but I’ve stood by it, staking my claim and refusing to dismiss it as worthless. It’s kinda like your murderer buddy that just won’t stop those pesky homicides. After a while, it just gets too hard to defend them.
So you might not have a friend on the run to Mexico, but the PageRank metaphor remains the same- I can no longer justify my desire to have high PR or to even care about it any longer. What ever happened to measuring the solid link juice and quality content? It’s all politics now.
So are smart to cash in, saying it’s the best thing to happen to them. I think it could benefit the TLA industry in more ways then they know.
PageRank Should No Longer be a Metric
It’s time to stop measuring a site’s link value by a now positively random number thrown down by the search juggernaut. There are so many things that can more accurately provide a rank for a site:
- Subscribers. You can use the public Bloglines numbers, maybe even the Google reader numbers if they become more easily accessed. Google does own FeedBurner, so they could really take into account some serious data there too.
- Traffic. You know what? Forget about sheer volume. Look at deeper stats. With Google Analytics, they could see all of that. Time spent, page views, bounce rate, organic traffic, etc…
Stopping there, things seem to tie back into Google. I’m thinking they could drop the whole “PageRank” and “link juice” thing and move to a more all around service that ranks pages with the data they collect on them. Not only would this actually give a good, accurate rank of pages, but it would be hard to argue. Judging only by links in, and the things associated with those links means PR now is subjective.
PageRank Shouldn’t Be Subjective
PageRank should be open. Have a defined formula. PageRank should be dynamic.
Using FeedBurner and GA to rank sort of forces users to utilize these services would likely be death in business, but think about it: Google’s search is a service to you. SEO takes advantage of that, in reality. Forcing you to use their products for higher ranks in their SERPs means huge boosts in respective market shares for all of their services.
The sour side is that WordPress blogs, as well as other (better) alternatives to their own Blogger and other… sub par Google services.
Back to the task at hand, basing PR on RSS reader numbers and traffic would provide more relevant results, I think. It’s like Alexa rankings- they may be inaccurate on a large scale to compare all sites to, but it’s great for a side by side comparison of two similar sites in the same niche.
In a more realistic train of thought however, this will probably never happen. If it does though, I want credit, money and a job at Google!
8 comments
October 28th, 2007 at 1:50 AM
I have to agree that Google should really update their PR algorithm. Now I am happy with this recent update (since my site went from PR 0 to PR 3).
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the future. I think Google will Update their algorithm, like they did for Paid Links.
October 28th, 2007 at 10:06 AM
RSS readers and site traffic are’nt very affective ways of judging a site’s importance. Most sites don’t have RSS and they are easy to spoof. If Google used traffic, within a very short period of time you would find traffic swapping netwroks where people set their server up to crawl sites in exchange that their site is crawled. There would be no way to detect this . Also, the ability to reliably detect site traffic is not so good in some countireis.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:10 PM
There will always be some sort of page rank, Most of the sites that got a lower pr deserved it. I still havent seen it change search engine rankings though so I am not sure what thats all about. Soon PR will be a thing of the past just like alexa!
October 29th, 2007 at 2:50 PM
I think blogs have an unfair ADVANTAGE compared to other sites. You see a lot more blogs with PR4 and PR5 than you do legitimate sites.
Look at Spoofee, DealNews, and Boddit. These sites are far better than a lot of the blogs that have higher PR.
Heck, the first blog I ever made got a PR5 in 4 months, and I had no idea what I was doing.
October 29th, 2007 at 6:27 PM
Blogs just have built in internal linking that ranks above average compared to most sites. Arhicves, sitemaps, categories, and all that measures up to a lot of intralinked pages.
This site was PR5 in January after being registered for 4 months and not being active (barely). Once the Jan 2007 PR update rolled out I was stunned anything happened at all.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:22 PM
PageRank won’t be going away anytime soon. It’s one of the best measures of unsolicited authority. Sure, it can be gamed to a degree but not as much as other methods mentioned above.
November 10th, 2007 at 1:07 AM
They went mostly after paid links . But i beleive to get more pr fresher content will be key.
December 29th, 2007 at 7:00 PM
IMHO, Pagerank is a non-updated way of checking a website’s importance. That PR can be 2 or 4 months old! so by the time you see that PR, at that point it can be higher or lower. The only and only way to see a site’s importance/popularity is by checking its position in the serps with its keywords. I have a PR4 site with all the keywords showing up from page3+ and a PR1 site with MOST keywords on page1 when searching its keywords on google. So it’s not about pagerank, that’s just a brainwashing way of advertising/showing off a site. It’s all about keyword competition here, and keyword also stands for content when it comes to google. YES, Google relies MORE on content than on keywords. IT’s what I’ve noticed from own experience.
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