News Source: http://www.beanstalk-inc.com
Published: Oct 24, 2007 - 04:23 pm
Story Found By: beanstalk 1568 Days ago
Category: SEO
19 Comments
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News Source: http://www.beanstalk-inc.com
Published: Oct 24, 2007 - 04:23 pm
Story Found By: beanstalk 1568 Days ago
Category: SEO
19 Comments
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Comments
and people wonder why it’s more black magic than science...
If you had a thermometer that never moved, you would assume it was broken and had ceased to function. That little green bar hasn’t moved in ages. Ergo ...
"If you had a thermometer that never moved, you would assume it was broken and had ceased to function. That little green bar hasn’t moved in ages. Ergo ..."Awesome. :)
"So we’ll focus on the real business and it’s very clear that what we’re really after is rankings, not PageRank. Once upon a time PageRank had a strong influence on rankings - that is not the case anymore."This article is out of date. If it was written last year maybe it would have held some validity.While I agree that business owners would do better to think in terms of marketing, traffic, and brand awareness instead of bulk buying high TBPR links with keyword stuffed anchor text, PageRank is and will always be to Google what gravity is to you and me.Authority, or high total domain PageRank (e.g. Wikipedia, with a slew of TBPR 5 deep pages), by itself may not reward you with any ranking boost, despite popular myth that authority is a dominant ranking factor.But who would argue against the fact that a site that has 100,000 pages in the main index doesn’t have a huge advantage over a site with 10 pages in the main index, simply because that’s 100,000 pages of real estate with internal anchor text that you can use to nail highly competitive rankings?Deep index penetration is one of the most efficient, powerful SEO tactics. And what is the gatekeeper that keeps unpopular sites from getting 100,000 pages in the main index?PageRank.Should you chase after PageRank? No. But if you are trying to make the case that gravity - which you aren’t conscious of - has no effect on your life then you’re making an indefensible claim. Sure, you don’t need to think about gravity to be able to drive a car to work. But without gravity, how will you manage to climb into your car?BTW, Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) is NOT PageRank."If you had a thermometer that never moved"Yes bwelford, but the green bar does move. If it doesn’t move for certain pages, you can either assume that the toolbar isn’t being updated as it should be or you can assume that the page isn’t important enough to have an up-to-date green bar. As you might have noticed, popular sites tend to have their toolbar updates before anyone else.
Ahhhh good, a debate. Of course I feel the need to respond.You’ll find the response at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/2007/10/pagerank-isnt-question-but-heres-some.html (easier to format the replies and make sure any of our non-Sphinn blog readers get the benefit of the comments and my replies).Thanks Halfdeck.
"At the time of this posting there are PageRank 3’s beating out PageRank 7’s."That is one of the weakest arguments against PageRank ever invented.There are also sites that have no keywords in the title outranking sites with keywords in the TITLE element. So from that let’s conclude that keywords in the TITLE doesn’t matter.http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=seo&btnG=Searchkeyword: [SEO]Wikipedia.org TITLE: "Search engine optimization"Spanish Wikipedia TITLE: "Posicionamiento en buscadores - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre"http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=ice+cream&btnG=Searchkeyword: [ice cream]haagen-dazs.com TITLE: "Häagen-Dazs®"bluebell.com TITLE: "MyOrganization: Home page"So its official then. Keywords in TITLE doesn’t matter."Really? Then why does Wikipedia (PR7 page) rank #1 and SEOMoz (PR7 page) rank #10 for "seo"?"As I wrote somewhere else, the phenomenon of wikipedia ranking for just about anything and everything under the sun, in my opinion, is largely due to high link trust (most inbounds to Wikipedia are editorial, unpaid for, unreciprocated, many from trustworthy sources), sheer link power (just about every page has high TBPR due to millions of backlinks), relevant on-page content, laser-targetted anchor text on 99% of all backlinks, and internal, contextual anchor text."What? I have no idea what this means. A site with a PageRank 2 can have 100,000 pages in the index if the owners or contributers are very very busy people."There, you just exposed your lack of understanding about PageRank.A TBPR 2 site can create 100,000 pages of content, but you will not see 100,000 in the MAIN INDEX. They will sink into the supplemental bin. That should be common knowledge by now.Read the blog links at the top of this page if you want to go beyond repeating what’s been said 1,000 of times already:http://www.seo4fun.com/notes/supplementals.html"Well I suppose that’s it then. I suppose it’s time to call up Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Neil Patel, Jill Whalen and all the other SEO’s who contributed to SEOmoz’s "Google Search Engine Ranking Factors" list and let them know that their work was for naught."Oh?I recommend you reading Dan Thies’ recent posts. Or read Rand Fishkin’shttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/my-personal-opinion-90-of-the-rankings-equation-lies-in-these-4-factorsWhere he lists "PageRank or link weight or link power" as one of the top 4 ranking factors. If you’re the type of SEO to base your opinion on "expert" opinion, there you have it.
"At the time of this posting there are PageRank 3’s beating out PageRank 7’s."One last thing.Internal PageRank is a floating number, not a number between 0-10. Matt Cutts has confirmed that in several posts. PageRank is a probability metric, or a number that describes chance: 0~100%, or a number between 0-1.If your website was the only website that existed on the web, then the chance of someone landing on your website is 100% or 1.If there were only two pages on the web, linking to each other, the chance of you landing on one of those pages is 50%, or .5.The sum of all PageRanks of all webpages add up to 1. Therefore, the internal PageRanks of a page is really really tiny, something like .000000000000002000195010.Of course Google can modify that for ease of computation, but we are still dealing with alot of digits.So what is TBPR? Some believe that they are exponents of an unknown base.base^TBPR = internal PageRank.For example:10^0 = 110^1 = 1010^2 = 10010^3 = 100010^4 = 1000010^5 = 10000010^6 = 100000010^7 = 1000000010^8 = 10000000010^9 = 100000000010^10 = 10000000000We don’t know the base. We don’t know the actual PageRank. We only see the exponent (0-10). Obviously, that’s just theory. But it does help you see there’s a big difference between TBPR and internal PageRank.If you truely understood that, you would never talk about a "PageRank 3" URL outranking anything, because:1) There’s no such thing as a PageRank 3 page2) You are clearly implying you know the PageRank of a page displaying TBPRX - you don’t.
Hey Halfdeck.Sorry I don’t allow comments on the blog. I just don’t always have time to moderate it and so I just don’t allow them. I have replied there complete with all comments from Jill and yourself. You can read it at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/2007/10/pagerank-debate-continues-over-at.html.I’m realizing now that we’re probably on different pages here regardless. If we read the post (the first one) you’ll note that this is about clients asking about PageRank. This is obviously about toolbar PageRank and I don’t really need a lesson on internal PageRank and how it’s constantly updated. I note in the first post, "... there have been some hiccups in the PageRank displayed in the tool bar we haven’t seen ..." Yes I am aware that the PageRank displayed in the toolbar varies from the actual PageRank. That’s why I wrote "the PageRank displayed in the toolbar" and not "some hiccups in PageRank".Regardless of the disagreement I thank you for the debate. Always good for SEO’s to "mix it up a bit". Let the readers sort it out for themselves.And yes, I am the sort of person who reads and takes the words of experts seriously. Hopefully you do too. I also use my own brain and run my own tests. If there’s any debate over skill, we rank well and we offer a top 10 money-back guarantee (for real phrases, not BS ones) and we’re still in business years later. Yes, I know what I’m talking about and I have a hunch we’re actually talking about different things here.
Halfdeck.Can you blast me off an email? Would like to chat with you. dave (at) beanstalk-inc.com.You’ll have to clear your email through spamarrest before it will get to me.Thanks !Dave Davies
Sorry I am jumping into this late. The thing I like about toolbar Page Rank is it a jumping off point for a discussion with clients about why all of the other things are important - crawlability, site performance, backlinks, etc. While I have my fair share of clients obsessing about that Toolbar thing, it’s such an abstraction that focusing on the concrete things that we all believe leads to a good PR quickly becomes a much more interesting subject for the client.I just reread that and man do I sound like goody two shoes. Easier to hit "submit" then edit though :)
I think for me the defining concept for PageRank’s place comes when I consider what it is I am really trying to do. The goal is to increase conversions, whether they be singups, leads, purchases, or just plain traffic. If that number goes up (bearing in mind projections based on seasonality and market fluctuations, then what you are doing is working and you should continue doing it. Does your average user know what your site’s PageRank is, or even heard of the phrase "PageRank"? With the exception of very specific in-industry niche audiences, the answer invariably is going to be no.Can it be a rough weather vane of how Google might feel about your site in general now as compared to how it did in the past... well, maybe. It always seems to be like 30-90 days out of date, when traffic spikes in one month as a result of visible ranking increases I might see a PageRank increase a couple months down the line. But, by that point I’ve already concluded from numbers that actually matter that the efforts I’ve done had a positive effect.I think the graduation from SEO dabbler to making a real serious go at it comes when you abandon novelties like PageRank and embrace metrics that you draw from observations that have a real tangible impact on your actual internal goals.
@Halfdeck - sorry, I misread your first comment and hit the minus sign before I realized you were saying the opposite of what I thought you were. So, when you look at it just remember there should be 2 more votes on it. My bad! (I upped the next one).As to the TBPR being out of date, or a different range - that doesn’t mean (well, didn’t before they pulled the crap they did this month anyways) that it is useless. Yes, you do need to look at more than just the green bar, and you do have to be aware of how old the data is... but it still can be useful.
Thanks to everyone who’s making this a real discussion on the subject. Always enjoyable.Jill, any references you can send me on the revelations by Dan?And I do know what you’re saying about high competition issues. But then, in those competitions we’ll often do a complete overhaul on the site to make it tableless and pull it into compliance in hopes of te 1% boost that might give. :)
Jill is referring to the SEMNE event that she covered here:http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/getting-into-google
"Halfdeck - sorry, I misread your first comment and hit the minus sign before I realized you were saying the opposite of what I thought you were."No worries man.Dave, email’s en route.
while we are the subject of blasting off emails maybe you could blast one of to me Dave Davis.. Then we can discuss the contract you never finished for me a few years ago... I think it was one article and 60 recip links...
Beanstalk, looks like your past is catching up to you ;)
DVOLA,I need to know who you are (can’t see your domain in your profile) before I can respond.Feel free to email or call - http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/bsi/contact.htm.If there’s unfinished work I’ll be happy to get it done but in future, if you could let me know directly rather than through a forum that would be great.Dave
I have deleted and rewritten this post 8 times before I came up with this.... Not wanting to turn this site or post into a playground I will drop you an email... and that is the best I could do ... me contacting you....