The Google Toolbar PageRank Demystified 143
nywanna writes "SEO is an extremely unpredictable aspect of running an online business. Every month the rules change slightly, and with every rule change we receive new bad information from speculators and those who spew nothing but conjecture. David Harry looks at one of the greatest Google misconceptions and bits of misinformation that exists right now:
This brings me to the greatest mythological creature to roam the Google landscape since 'the sandbox'; The Google Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) system. While the jury may still be out on the 'sandbox,' I am here to slay the beast that is the TBPR, right here, right now."
What's SEO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Search Engine Optimisation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/finance?q=SEO [google.com]
Or it might be search engine optimization...ya never know.
(yes, I looked it up)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:5, Informative)
Search Engine Optimization
Basically it means trying to get your web pages listed as highly as possible on search engine result pages (a.k.a. SERPs)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
If you aren't into cheating with cloaked pages and doorway pages, the best way to get targeted traffic is to add value to visitors' experience. They come to your site, find its a good site, and spread the word. The more useful and relevant your site, the more visitors will return. In a nutshell, make a good site. Simple, really. I wouldn't be surprised to find that pagerank was a decoy set up to distract search engine marketers and let google go about its business.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Insightful)
You see, most sites that care about SOE do so because they are a business entity, and want to drive eyeballs, ahem, customers, to their web sites so that they will buy products and make the company founders rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Of course, most of those sites add absolutely no value to the customer.
So, SOE is something that the marketing firms latch on because site/business owners think (rightly so because their site is crap) they need to spend money on to attract cust
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Interesting)
Honest SEO means recommending changes that improve the indexability and content of the page: changing URLs to make them more concise and descriptive, adding proper keywords (not "stuffed" lists), adding a decent description, removing Flash and/or providing alternate content, adding alternate text for images, adding sitemaps, and a l
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, SEO goes beyond that - things like code quality can have a major impact as well.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
It's not that simple (Score:5, Informative)
If you aren't into cheating with cloaked pages and doorway pages, the best way to get targeted traffic is to add value to visitors' experience. They come to your site, find its a good site, and spread the word. The more useful and relevant your site, the more visitors will return. In a nutshell, make a good site. Simple, really. I wouldn't be surprised to find that pagerank was a decoy set up to distract search engine marketers and let google go about its business.
I'm in full agreement that creating useful, relevant content is the cornerstone of website success. But it's not as easy as that. Pagerank is not a decoy - it is what allowed Google to take over as top dog in the search world. The core concept behind PageRank is that if a site is linked to by other sites, this must be for good reason. It is an indirect method of determining relevance. Of course it has been gamed over the years, but PageRank still matters. If it didn't, we'd all still be using AltaVista.
The trickiest part of getting noticed by engines is obtaining useful inbound links. If people can't see your site, they won't be able to evaluate it and (hopefully) link to it. It's the old marketing conundrum. How do I get the word out about this great thing I've created, when I'm just one fish in a giant ocean? Some people go the quick and dirty route, using search engine spamming techniques, which are akin to the scummy marketing tactics of snail mail advertisers (ever received a piece of mail seemingly related to your home mortgage, and found it was actually an ad from a competing lender?).
Just as with traditional offline marketing and advertising, there are legitimate ways to put the word out. They're slower and more labor intensive than fast buck methods, but they can help. Inbound links from well-respected sites, proper use of markup, clearly-written listings in directories, and keyword targeting can help your site gain visibility while helping searchers at the same time. Sites that ignore SEO can succeed, but most that do succeed rely on SEO to at least some degree.
Re:It's not that simple (Score:3, Insightful)
be the best fish. the only fish that one will ever need.
it's as easy as that, nemo.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:4, Informative)
photography (Score:2)
For instance, I'm a photographer. I have a lot of good samples of my work on my website, and people searching for a photographer in a particular market or of a particular style would do well to find my site.
Have you thought about using any of the small stock agencies? There's iStockphoot [istockphoto.com], Shutterstock.com [shutterstock.com], Big Stock Phot [bigstockphoto.com] as well as others. The three above and others are royalty free and don't pay much, in an article in the current print edition of Popular Photography [popphoto.com] the highest paying pure photo onl
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
The world doesn't need such filth. Remember the first commandment.
HTML is the and only one web-publishing medium. Thou shalt not worship any other.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
If you aren't into cheating with cloaked pages and doorway pages, the best way to get targeted traffic is to add value to visitors' experience. They come to your site, find its a good site, and spread the word. The more useful and relevant your site, the more visitors will return. In a nutshell, make a good site.
Ah but most people find websites by searching for them to begin with, if they don't know you exist they won't come. However unless a new website is about something obscure it's difficult to get
Re: What's SEO? (Score:2)
(* I'll leave the argument about whether SEO is an acronym or merely an abbreviation for another day...)
I came in here for an argument (Score:2)
Ah man. I was hoping for a pointless flame war that could be settled in 5 seconds if one side bothered to check a dictionary.
(Just in case it's not too late: acronym v. abbreviation. RADAR is one, CTO is the other, DVD is neither.)
Re: I came in here for an argument (Score:2)
[fx: resists]
[fx: resists]
[fx: yields]
Yeah, well, I too was once of the simple, dogmatic view. (That if you pronounce it as a word, it's an acronym; if you spell out the letters, it's an abbreviation.) But then I checked dictionaries.
(For example, Chambers says that an acronym is "usually pronounced as a word". COD similarly says "a word, usu. pronounced as such". Note the suggestive but far from prescriptive 'usually'.)
And what have you against 'DVD'? Does it not stand officia [dvdforum.org]
Re: I came in here for an argument (Score:2)
DVD is neither an abbreviation nor an acronym. Your source bears that out.
If DVD was an abbreviation, wouldn't they write it out 'Digital Versatile Disc'? (all initial caps) From Wikipedia:
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2, Funny)
POS.
KFG
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Insightful)
I call goofiness! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be *much* happier with google if they gave me a box to click to "turn off shopping sites".
Re:I call goofiness! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the problem is that the results returned by Goolge are 99% spam and you have to wade through dozens of pages with results to find one or more that may be of interest.
Maybe you should search for something besides Viagra.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
searching (Score:2)
I no longer use google for searches, it's become a disaster.
It depends on what I'm searching for as to which SE I'll use. Most of the tyme I use Google, but other tymes I first use About for instance.
FalconRe:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Secondary Executive Officer (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2, Informative)
The alchemy-like "science" which believes you can magic traffic to your website, rather than providing content which people want.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
-dZ.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Nathan
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Funny)
Can the savvy author not be expected to have the wit to know that simply expanding the acronym would reduce needless reduncancy and eliminate the waste of time and bandwidth of asking thousands of slashdotters to search Google or Wikipedia? My sense of thoughtfulness (ST) suggests that a foremost unfolding of acronyms (FUA) leads to a more sage sophistry (SS). In other words, STFUASS.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:2)
SEO
SEM
TBPR
LGB
LSA
ROI
SES
SERP
From this we can conclude that the people who spam search engines (err... I mean 'optimize' web sites) really like confusing people with acronyms.
Demystified? (Score:5, Insightful)
There was no demystification here, just a call to kill / ignore it. I like the summary though at the end of the article : Make your own conclusions;
Re:Demystified? (Score:1)
Re:Demystified? (Score:1)
Re:Demystified? (Score:4, Insightful)
My conclusion is that the author of the article is clueless. He doesn't like Google PageRank, but he can't even clearly state why.
Nooooo! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nooooo! (Score:5, Interesting)
But in the end it doesn't really matter except for bragging rights. Although those bragging rights can help raise sponsors...
Re:Nooooo! (Score:2)
Anyways, just about any Slashdot user with a siginificant number of posts (or just an oddball name) will find their
Re:Nooooo! (Score:2)
Re:Nooooo! (Score:2)
Re:Nooooo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Google toolbar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google PR (Score:2, Informative)
Its the Google PR displayed if you have the google tool bar installed
This is old news - the pr that it displays is almost worthless and I bloged about this ages back here [thuk.co.uk] Back in April. We did some tests and created a stand alone page on a brand new domain that we got a displayd PR of 5 in a couple of weeks.
Was it just me? (Score:2)
Or did anyone else accidentally read
as And do a double-take?Re:Was it just me? (Score:3, Funny)
Useless Search Engine Optimization Blather (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Useless Search Engine Optimization Blather (Score:1)
*from the first line of TFA
Re:Useless Search Engine Optimization Blather (Score:5, Funny)
He should be in marketing... oh, wait... nevermind.
Re:Useless Search Engine Optimization Blather (Score:2)
Actually, marketing tries to find a way to say nothing in a short and engaging way.
Demystified, my arse.... (Score:2)
Re:Demystified, my arse.... (Score:2)
publish a detailed spec? So that SEO slime could game the search engines even more than they already do, and get sites with pitches for for V!@gRrraAA@@ placed ahead of the sites that I'm really looking for?
I'm generally all for open standards, but in this case, I'm content to have Google keep their algorithms proprietary, which in turn keeps the SEO spammers chasing their tails and out of my search results. If an open spec is that much better for searching, a competitor will come up with a way for it to
Re:Demystified, my arse.... (Score:2)
Pagerank isn't completely useless (Score:1)
Re:Pagerank isn't completely useless (Score:2)
Re:Pagerank isn't completely useless (Score:2)
And what exactly make you think they aren't? :-)
Demystified, more like Demoralized (Score:2, Informative)
Was there anything useful in that article?
I think there were more Acronyms used in that article than ive ever seen before. Looks like the Author just wanted to sound like he knew what he was talking about by throwing out every acronym known to his little clique of developers. (im
Re:Demystified, more like Demoralized (Score:3, Funny)
Many people put too much emphasis on Page Rank, but they shouldn't. Page Rank is not very helpful.
A lot of people depend too much on Page Rank, and this is not good. The results of Page Rank do not give too much information.
Many marketers would do good to not put too much emphasis on Page Rank, as I believe it has little to do with actual results ranking.
Oh, and by the way, did I mention that Page Rank has nothing to do with Google's actual results? At least that's what I
Of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but I can imagine a surfer finding the camera of his dreams and buying it from some schlock electronics outfit with an artificially high page rank.
Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is. So if five million people link to a white supremacist site, that means there's valuable content there, right?
This is where Google's power is diluted and why a lot of the searches I do seem to come up with pretty crappy results. PageRank is pointless, if only because a) actually useful sites may very well not get linked to very much, as no one wants the sites overrun by the whole Internet or b) uselss sites with drivel for content may be over-linked because a few million idiots think that the content is the word-of-the-lord.
What is needed is a personal page-ranking system -- a central repository where people can rate websites based on factors that matter (ease of use, content, etc.), kind of like the Zagat guide to web sites. It's not enough to blindly search for any site that links to the data I want; I need it to link to site that have the data I want and have it a useful/easy-to-find format.
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is. So if five million people link to a white supremacist site, that means there's valuable content there, right?
I guess the question would be, valuable to whom and for what? If five million people link to a white supremacist site, maybe the FBI would find that to be a valuable site to investigate?
What is needed is a personal page-ranking system -- a central repository where people can rate websites based on
Re:Of course not (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
I seem to remember reading that pagerank ranks links from pages with low pagerank, well, lower.
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
That's part of the point behind the nofollow attribute, so you can link to a site like that without passing on pagerank to them.
Re:Of course not (Score:3, Insightful)
It means there's popular content there, which is often what people are looking for. The white supremacist site with a pagerank of 6 is probably better (by whatever criteria one uses to judge white supremacist sites) then the one with a pagerank of 3.
Is it valuable content? Most people would say no
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
That's exactly what we don't need, a system that can be easily manipulated. Your Zagat style idea exists, it's called Yahoo and it's not a scaleable way to order results. DMOZ is another example and that site is ridden with corruption. An algo has to assume people are untrustworthy and not invite manual manipulation. To that end, Google & Yahoo do manually edit bad results.
PageRank is one of hundreds of factors. Up to about 2002, Google's algo hea
Re:Of course not (Score:4, Insightful)
Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is.
Exactly! That's why Google became the number one search engine on the planet. In the early days of search engines (when sites like Altavista [altavista.com] and HotBot [hotbot.com] were king) pages were ranked soley on their own content. The idea of analyzing the links between pages was absolutely revolutionary. Prior to that the best measure of a search engine was the number of pages it indexed - a number that was proudly displayed [archive.org] on the front page of most search engines of that time.
Lots of pages indexed meant lots of results. You often had to wade through up to 10 pages of results to find what you were looking for. Although all the results contained the correct keywords the actual content was often wildly irrelevant. Relevance was gauged by factors like the number of times a keyword appeared on the page, encouraging the creation of pages full of crap (such as tiny white text on white background repeating popular search phrases tens or hundreds of times).
Enter Google. The relevance of results increased dramatically. It became common to find what you were looking for on the first page of results. Hell, the results were so good they introduced the I'm Feeling Lucky button to take you immediately to the first result. That's why today most people don't search for information anymore, they google [wikipedia.org] for it.
It's true that PageRank has it's own problems, and that content spamming [wikipedia.org] has been largely replaced by link spamming [wikipedia.org]. Still, things are much better these days than before Google came around.
Re:Of course not (Score:2)
The hash that is eBay rankings, Slashdot moderation, Digging, and Amazon reccomendations all mitigate against that being useful. In addition, the Zagat guide has come under considerable criticism for it's varied and sundry flaws. (Restaurants being ranked highly due to subjective factors, or because i
Sandbox? (Score:2, Interesting)
The sandbox however is a problem many of us are still grappling with. Do any slashdotter's have any insights into Google's sandbox?
Re:Sandbox? (Score:2)
Basically I'm saying age is just another of many factors. There is not sandbox per se.
tfa demystified (Score:2)
Seriously, why did I even bother to give my eyeballs to that article?
Re:tfa demystified (Score:1)
/. Ranked 9 out of 10 (Score:2)
digg.com gets a 7 out of 10, so that ends it,
Best way to get ranked higher... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Best way to get ranked higher... (Score:2)
Work hard, play by the rules, and you will succeed in life. Those that cheat will never prosper. Cheaters never win!
Nice things to tell small children, but adults with IQ over 90 should know that it's not always the case.
A lot of people have useful and unique websites that have been in existence for years. Which come up on page 8 on Googl
SEO Links (Score:1)
Do I understand this argument correctly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do I understand this argument correctly? (Score:2)
-dZ.
PR to guide purchases (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I've done exactly that. After dismissing it based on the pagerank I read up on the site and found that it was in fact crooked. The author shouldn't take things for granted just because he doesn't trust pagerank...
Nice old SEO advice... (Score:2)
Also, the sandbox is less of a mystery since Matt Cutts said they recognized behavior consistent with a sandbox. New sites are not given fair treatment and appear to be penalized.
I don't expect
LGB rankings of some common pages (Score:1)
FYI: some common page ranks
digg (7)
google (10)
personalized google homepage (~4)
microsoft.com (9)
apple.com (10)
slashdot (11)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
And then once in a while Slashdot goes and links to one of those useless articles on one of those web sites. Imagine how much money that guy just made from all the Slashdot visitors, not to mention the pagerank boost from a Slashdot link. And for an article that bad that he knocked out without really putting any effort into it?
Wow.
Not True (Score:2)
Nope. Sometimes they change A Lot!
google sitemaps is more useful (Score:3, Interesting)
This is also usefull if you are thinking of running adwords on your site, as it gives you an idea of what types of ads will appear on your site.
Re:google sitemaps is more useful (Score:2)
You're Missing the Point of PR (Score:2, Interesting)
The real irony of the article (Score:2)
Or is it a conspiracy?
SEO = BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You want good rank and good hits? Write good content.
well dear crybaby (Score:1, Funny)
what's the matter with you tough guy?
page rank give you a 2 rating?
feeling lonely?
rejected?
Did you try e-harmony? I hear it works
PS: I mean the article not the parent. fyi