Comments on: PageRank: The Blogosphere’s Stupidest Metric

By: Ruben Timmerman

Ruben Timmerman — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 23:22:12 +0000

PR as a concept might be around forever, but it’s form changes every time Google updates it’s algorythms. Which is a lot more then the tri-monthly dances or now with the bigdaddy infrastructure coming in place.

I think at some point G will stop communicating about PR, because it decreases the value of their ranking. PR doesn’t have anything to do with relevancy, and relevancy is the only thing searchers care about.

On the other hand, PR updates go together with backlink updates, and they do often change the rankings quite a lot. My relatively new blog went from PR0 to PR4, and in the process I gained a lot of places in rankings on keywords I want to rank well for. So I was happy that PR got updated, but yes, mainly because my rankings are better now and I’m getting more traffic.

By: nachoninja

nachoninja — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 06:29:19 +0000

You guys can forget about PageRank all you want but the botton line is that there are more bloggers and website owners that care about PageRank than those who don’t. PageRank is one of those things that is going to be around forever and have an impact on people regardless if it has no value or not.

My thoughts are that PageRank DOES have a value and worth but only to those that don’t really know.

By: Raj Dash

Raj Dash — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:21:14 +0000

Be that as it may, how do you account for the fact that the traffic for my blogs that go up from 0 to whatever, immediately afterwards enjoy a surge of traffic, even when I haven’t posted a new entry in several days? This has happened each time Google recalc’d PR on my sites since last June, without fail. For those blogs that stayed at PR 0, traffic still sucks, regardless of my posting schedule AND topic.

Now, I’m willing to believe that a change of PR matters more for those sites/ blogs that don’t have a lot of traffic to begin with. Guilty. Maybe a PR change isn’t as important for a site with loads of traffic to begin with.

For example, if I only have, say, 25 pageviews/d for a PR 0 site, and that goes up to 50 pv/d when the PR goes up (to at least PR4), then that’s a 100% increase. I don’t have a site with tons of traffic, so I can’t say if the increase will be 100% as well, or just the same 25 pageviews. From this perspective, I may not be qualified to make my claim. But my focus has always been for beginning bloggers, and my claims are based on what I’ve seen for my own sites.

Maybe I’ll feel as you do when I have a site getting thousands of pageviews daily. Or maybe Google (and others) use PR as a gimmick to motivate you towards a goal of getting linked to, etc.

By: Martin Neumann

Martin Neumann — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:00:23 +0000

Spot on, Nick … it’s a gimmick and we focus way too much on it.

I’d rather have 1000 readers and PR of 1 than 100 readers and a PR of 6, and in turn which would you rather have:

- revenues of $8,000 with a PR2 or;
- revenues of $2,000 with a PR7

And these examples are true.

I’ve long forgotten about PageRank.

Nick, dude – I’m eating my breakfast, happily reading your post and I come to the last sentence … (breakfast over!)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:08:53 +0000

I've seen with my own eyes the difference between having a pagerank of 0 and something more than 0 (4-6).

Have you? I can't claim any such thing with 100% certainty. Page rank is months behind by the time you see it in the toolbar, and Google engineers themselves will tell you it acccounts for only a small portion of the actual calculation. In fact, one was famously quoted saying that the tool bar page rank was for "entertainment purposes only". Its a red herring. A wild goosechase. What's real, and far more worthy of attention is:

Actual traffic figures
Activity - posts/comments/trackbacks
Conversions
Revenue

Not some out of date, entertainment only red herring that serious search marketers started ignoring 3yrs or more. It's fun, but that's pretty much the extent of it.

By: Raj Dash

Raj Dash — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:47:52 +0000

I was just about to post a “my page rank increased” post when I saw this. Nick, you’ve said this before. Why’n't you say why? Qualify your statement Or did I miss the invisible tag?

I’ve seen with my own eyes the difference between having a pagerank of 0 and something more than 0 (4-6). Like most web metrics, it has different value to different bloggers. One blogger’s useless is another blogger’s … As soon as my PR changed in my newest active blogs, the traffic went up.

Oh and by the way, I extracted myself long enough away from Firefox to check that in my IE browser, Performancing is at a Google PR of 7 . No doubt after the flames, it’ll go up to 7.03013, or something ;>