Comments on: Does Persistence Always Pay? What to do when a virtual economy is on the verge of collapse

By: andy_boyd

andy_boyd — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:19:08 +0000

I agree with what Ryan is saying. Google’s PR metric is as much about marketing Google as it is anything else. Read any newspaper article on them and you’ll find Google and PR in the same sentence.

So for us webmasters, we shouldn’t be shocked if / when Google calls time on publically available PR and nor should we particularly care. Yes it will negatively impact people selling links in the short term, but it won’t take long for a more open way of measuring power (like the SEOMoz page strength tool or Jim Boykin’s strong subpage tool) to fill the void. In fact, there’s probably a market there …

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:04:39 +0000

people will always look for the shortcut, the easy to grasp, all-in-one, trustworthy indicator of quality. pagerank gave that to people before the possibility for abuse became obvious and still people went for it because there were no alternatives.

ryan is absolutely right about focusing on brand quality – I wrote about this last year in ‘long term seo‘, it’s worth a read and talks about how you can guarantee that your site will be rewarded by such metrics in the future as well.

By: Ryan Caldwell

Ryan Caldwell — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:12:57 +0000

“It is easy to say don’t worry about pagerank if your site has PR7.”

Why is PR7 relevant?

I’m telling you that the only way to find success long term is to focus on building a brand. Performancing is a strong brand. Why? Because of quality services and blogging tips.

My whole point is that until Google has a *good* public metric for site quality, you should ignore them and start focusing on brand quality instead, which should naturally get rewarded by any *good* metric in the future.

By: matt608

matt608 — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:20:45 +0000

It is easy to say don’t worry about pagerank if your site has PR7. If you are still stuck on toolbar PR0 because Google hasn’t updated and as a result are struggling to convince advertisers you site is worth its salt where you spend that big TLA check isn’t an issue. I would actually like Google to change the system to make it more effective, but some notice from them would be nice. It’s affecting our livelyhoods.

By: Ryan Caldwell

Ryan Caldwell — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:05:51 +0000

But Ahmed…

Let’s Go straight to the source:

“PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page”

Elementary logic tells me that if PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of a page, and if Performancing has a higher PageRank than Drudge, then Performancing is measured as having a higher importance than Drudge.

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:40:40 +0000

My nitpicky nature says:

In the grand scheme of things, Toolbar PR is close to meaningless (Argument From Absurdity: it tells us that Performancing is more important than the DrudgeReport)

TBPR tells us that one site has more links pointing to it than the other. But not all links are created equal, so it doesn’t translate into the conclusion that Perf is more imp than DR

Other than that, I think you can still sell linkjuice instead of PageRank – the problem is that there’s no easy metric apart from PageRank. SEOMoz’s pagestrength maybe, but we need something better.