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)
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;
Google toolbar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Useless Search Engine Optimization Blather (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:Nooooo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Best way to get ranked higher... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do I understand this argument correctly? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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 customers.
These people of course do not realize that google does not want that to happen so that they keep tweaking the search engine to drop the crap sites.
This is the perfect "nerd revenge" if you ask me.
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. White supremacists would say yes.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
SEO = BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You want good rank and good hits? Write good content.
Re:What's SEO? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, SEO goes beyond that - things like code quality can have a major impact as well.