Comments on: Why Page Rank is not useful

By: btard deleted nostatus

btard deleted nostatus — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:31:20 +0000

[...] reading a post I wrote about Google Page Rank being garbage and noticed that someone mentioned the word ‘moot’ and in context – [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:50:07 +0000

case.edu is now 7/10 … PR is some kind of useless in my opinion …

By: btard

btard — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:26:44 +0000

Yeah, we've had this conversation a few times on MSN. I've been writing on forums about the relative uselessness of PR. Enjoy the long weekend. What is there to do on BC day?

By: Dan Nedelko

Dan Nedelko — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:20:46 +0000

The horrid green little bar is a marketing tool. Period.

There are is the Algorithmic PageRank (which has no upper limit) and the marketing PageRank (which is the 0-10).

Any further investigation of it having relevance beyond CPM based advertising sales is moot. Have a read:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Also keep in mind Case Western University is classed on an EDU IP block which will also be considered of high quality (much easier to attain that magical 0-10) as opposed to a Commercial site.

Have a great long weekend.

By: btard

btard — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:27:38 +0000

Heidi, thanks for the comments. I get a lot of value from people's opinions when I actually try to write a critical post.

I imagine I should have noted that obtaining high PR is not usually possible with niche sites. To quote Google:

"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 more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; 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"."

I guess if you don't have a globally popular site then you won't get that inbound link thing happening, however, your site still may be the authority on "Blue Widgets" and thus shouldn't Google at least acknowledge it? I don't know, just asking questions. For me, being top in the search engines for key phrases is more important to me than that horrid little green bar :)

BTW. I don't know if this is a localized thing but I'm seeing case.edu as having 8/10 PR.

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:12:52 +0000

I think Page Rank should be considered on a relative scale. You may be the top blue widget distributor, but if blue widgets are a niche market you're just never going to get a Page Rank of 9 like we have for http://www.case.edu. Your small company site, no matter how wonderful, just won't have the breadth of content that draws inbound links the way a large university or corporate site would.

That's O.K. though because you're not competing with Case, you're only competing with other Blue Widget folks. In that category perhaps 4 is considered very high. My blog, which is a bit over 3 years old now has a rank of 6. I host it on the Case blog server, so I gain benefit from the association with the university. Also as I've created more content there is more to link to and many of my readers have been kind enough to Stumble or link to my pages. But even if I were to blog every day, and if each of those entries was brilliant, I still don't think I'd come close to a 9.

p.s. I downloaded the Google Toolbar to get the Pagerank to show up in my browser.