Is The Google PageRank Tool Underrated?
Written by Pablo Palatnik on August 22, 2007
Not long ago, Google announced they are doing away with its PageRank feature in the toolbar. Loren as SearchEngineJournal wrote an article, “Goodbye Google PageRankâ€, which had 46 comments from people discussing if it was valuable or not.
As Google explains it, “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.â€
As SEO’s, of course PageRank is relevant. Even if it’s not accurate, I believe it to be a relevant tool to measure a websites value as Google explains it. For a while now, while explaing to a client who has been paying for SEO efforts, most will touch on the pagerank as a key factor of website optimization.
Just going to a website, one of the first things I look at, maybe by habit now, is the sites pagerank. Matt Cutts said PR Updates are considered pretty much a non-event around google. PR is out of date and doesn’t really show the value of a website…and I guess we can all agree and even if we don’t agree, MATT CUTTS says so.
But from looking at most of the websites I go to, blogs, etc. the PR for most things just MAKE SENSE. Again, it might not be IMPORTANT but it just seems like a relevant tool that Google can really improve a bit on its functionality, explain it in full to understand instead of people trying to make out each number, and make it more of a useful and reliable tool.
Maybe individuals have not given value to the pagerank tool, but businesses have! Take the company Pay-Per-Post for example. In thier business model, the more pagerank you want the blogger to be blogging about your service/produce, the more you will pay for that post. Also, websites with high pagerank ask for more money for advertisement and links as a result of thier PAGERANK by making that a key source in thier sale.
[added sphinn comments myself]
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2 Responses to “Is The Google PageRank Tool Underrated?”
The article says the PageRank meter is going away. That’s not the case — Google hasn’t said that at all.
By Danny Sullivan on Aug 24, 2007
“Not long ago, Google announced they are doing away with its PageRank feature in the toolbar.”
Completely untrue. Maybe Loren could have phrased it better, but the discussion was started by tedster from WMW who wrote a list of why he wants Google to dump the green bar from its toolbar.
Adam Lasnik popped in to say the TBPR is useful for Google users but asked for feedback on features that might make the toolbar more useful (not to SEOs or webmasters, but to the general public - which is what the toolbar was built for in the first place).
By Halfdeck on Aug 24, 2007