Michael Martinez shows a different perspective to the potential of controlling PageRank and other "juice" around a site.
Michael has also recently written about "When Google dumps the Web from its index" and "Spoking About The Perfect Hub Strategy"
A good read for some difference of opinion, but I haven’t experienced any "dump" or drop in rankings and in many ways Michael’s hub article conflicts with the one on PageRank, because you can create internal hubs as well.
4 Comments
Michael has also recently written about "When Google dumps the Web from its index" and "Spoking About The Perfect Hub Strategy"
A good read for some difference of opinion, but I haven’t experienced any "dump" or drop in rankings and in many ways Michael’s hub article conflicts with the one on PageRank, because you can create internal hubs as well.
4 Comments
Comments
You can read my response to Michael here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru#jtc33717 Though I disagree with his conclusions, his write-up of PageRank is worth a read.
One factor that could be a problem with a number of Michael’s sites is how deep they are rather than wide. I have seen both Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox talk about making sites wider rather than deeper. On Seo-Theory Michael seems to have pages that are 5 or more levels deep which can’t help them get some juice. The easy fix is my recently adopted Wordpress plugin Custom Query String
Hmm. Michael says "SEO Myth: You can control the flow of PageRank on your site" and then later "You cannot control the flow of PageRank on your Web site but you can control your own internal link flow. Link flow is not PageRank." To me, the second statement (choosing how to link within your site) clearly does control the flow of PageRank on your site. I agree with much of Michael’s ideas, but his habit of flatly asserting things can undermine his arguments. For example, he says "So when Google sits down to calculate PageRank for 20 billion pages, you automatically get a certain amount of that PageRank... The sum of your starting PageRank is X divided by 20 billion, but each of your pages has the same starting PageRank: 1 divided by X divided by 20 billion." That’s just not how it works. So I took this article with a grain of salt.
"each of your pages has the same starting PageRank: 1 divided by X divided by 20 billion." I must have skimmed his post too fast. My code that calculates PageRank assigns a default PageRank value of 0 to all URLs. But using a default value of 1 or 10 or 1000 would still result in the same set of PageRanks after a few dozen iterations.