What Price PageRank?
What Price PageRank?: "I get asked often how to improve PR. It happened many times last week. My stock answer, 'PageRank isn't so important, so just forget about it,' draws some very confused looks from people who somehow are convinced it's vital for ranking.What's more, one question I was asked last week had me slightly dumbfounded for a moment: 'If you're saying I can't value links that I buy based on PageRank, how do I value how much I'd be prepared to pay for them?'
This is the stark reality: People still actually buy and sell links valued against Google's PR score. Which is ridiculous. It's just buying into the myth.
Once I realized the guy was serious, my answer was simple. 'A link from a popular and well visited Web site can be invaluable if it sends you qualified traffic that converts. The true value of a link has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with PageRank....
Boykin pointed me to an example of where he'd used the ad-space method, but he didn't want me to publish the URL. The most interesting thing I discovered about his page choice was he'd done his homework. It has 125 .edu domains and two .gov domains among those linking back to it.
I've long said Google very much approves of links from .edu and .gov sites due to their "authority." Boykin's heard me say it many times before.
As he himself says: "To me, that was the selling point. Personally, I could care less about PageRank."
"It's the neighborhood, which means the most to me," he continued. "I'll normally try to find the authority sites in an industry and approach them to see what they're offering. I'll try to bargain anything, from buying their office pizza to giving them free products from the site I'm seeking advertising for, or will outright pay them...
Apostolis Gerouslis, one of the foremost scientists in information retrieval on the Web and founder of Teoma. He was quite happy to go further than anyone on this side of the SEM fence by openly stating he doesn't believe Google had ever actually implemented PR as a ranking mechanism...
What price PageRank? The price is actually based more on your own wasted time and effort if you honestly believe that little green meter on the Google toolbar counts for anything more than novelty value."
posted by Jen @ 8:29 AM
<< Home