Comments on: EatonWeb To Devalue PageRank… What Are Your Thoughts?

By: csburdick

csburdick — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:51:28 +0000

I believe it’s a great move to devalue PageRank completely. It’s absolutely inaccurate since Google decided to manually manipulate results, and no longer has any true indication of importance. I also think that devaluing PR will have a great effect for EatonWeb, because people will talk about it (“EatonWeb is first directory to ignore PageRank – More to come”) Hopefully this would start more sites doing the same, since PR has no value anymore.

By: Blaine Moore

Blaine Moore — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:47:26 +0000

I don’t see a problem with it. I’ve been ignoring page rank for most of the past year now.

By: pholpher

pholpher — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:07:42 +0000

I think it’s a good move. Even before the recent PR craziness, PR was still not very accurate. It’s always at least 3 months old so any algorithm the weights it too heavily will be penalizing the many quality but new sites.

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:00:48 +0000

Agreed.

In the absence of a ‘detailed’ analysis, I would give more value to technorati rankings, pure linkage, search rankings, subscription counts and actual traffic (barring that, alexa) as more reliable indicators than PR.

PageRank is theoretically still a valid measure of your site’s linkage but the penalties have made it impossible to judge accurately.

By: Advice_Network

Advice_Network — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:00:48 +0000

I’ve never heard of EatonWeb directory until this moment, so one thing this move is doing for them is giving them some exposure. Smart!

By: Ryan Caldwell

Ryan Caldwell — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 08:54:03 +0000

Honestly, I use Alexa exclusively to monitor my own site traffic trends because I don’t participate much in the tech/SEO niches and I believe that Alexa gives me all the real data on trending that I need.

That said, I still use my site stats to monitor keywords;-)

By: saloschin

saloschin — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 08:41:21 +0000

It’s the right move. Not to ignore PR completely, but to give it less “weight” in the algorithm- that is until/unless it becomes meaningful again. The problem is….one could say that same about Alexa and Technorati- so there we’d be back to an argument about perception = reality.

Nevertheless, to come full circle- this update has rendered pagerank of little importance (in the short-term) for Eaton Web’s purposes and therefore such a move is justified and commendable.