

Shut up about PageRank already - portentint
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/06/pagerank-8-reasons-dont-care.htm

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

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TuxPirate
> _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.

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portentint
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.

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blackboxxx
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
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.

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

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
Too bad that automatic rank checking is not allowed per Google ToS.

~~~
devenson
Good to know, thanks.

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mattdeboard
I'm confused. He says PageRank is useless but then go on to compare it
favorably to toolbar PageRank?

What does 50% useless mean?

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ZoFreX
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?

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wickedchicken
>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?

