The Google Toolbar PageRank Demystified

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."

Search Engine Optimisation

[MarkByers]

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aseo&start= 0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozil la:en-US:official [google.com]

Re:Nooooo!

[truthsearch]

Half the internet got their PR up to 5. Half of those who were already at 5 got bumped up to 6. To me 5 is the new 4 and 6 is the new 5. 9 is reserved for Slashdot, 8 for Wikipedia, and 7 for lots of useless but popular blogs.

But in the end it doesn't really matter except for bragging rights. Although those bragging rights can help raise sponsors...

Sandbox?

[OverDrive33]

I know this is slightly offtopic - but what info does he have for or against sandboxed sites? If you're actually active in the SEO community this article will be old news to you (as opposed to having only a passing interest in SEO, resulting in over emphasis on PR -- lots of SEO clients have this problem).
The sandbox however is a problem many of us are still grappling with. Do any slashdotter's have any insights into Google's sandbox?

PR to guide purchases

[Sam3.14]

"Can you imagine some surfer finding the digital camera of his dreams at a knock-down bargain price but refusing to buy it because the page it's on only has a PR of one? I don't think so."

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...

google sitemaps is more useful

[micheas]

MURL:http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/> shows you which words are associated with your site. This gives a much clearer idea of how google views your site than pagerank alone, as your pagerank can be fixed by posting links to your site all over the place.

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:What's SEO?

[IdleTime]

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.

I no longer use google for searches, it's become a disaster.

Re:Of course not

[BasilBrush]

Well one thing that Google can do is to watch the internet marketers forums for the common advice on how to optimise for search engines, and then add a check for those tricks to their algorithms and punish those sites that try them. I suspect that they have been doing that for a long time. Which is another reason to just try to produce the best possible site without trying to game Google rankings.

You're Missing the Point of PR

[writerjosh]

You're missing the point of the Google toolbar in the first place: it's not to help out SEO guys, it's to help out average-joe surfers. Think about it, the LGB is a graphic representation that is meant to be easily understood at a quick glance: user sees high PR, user clicks/buys product on page. Voila! High PR does work after all! PR may not mean that much in the big picture of SEO from the SEO guys' perspective, but it means a whole lot from the user perspective. And isn't that what we're all trying to do in the first place; get the user to click? LGB still has LOTS of value.

Re:What's SEO?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Well, you see, it's not quite that simple. Once you work with an honest SEO professional for a while, you realize that there are two different kinds of SEO: honest and dishonest.

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 lot more. Basically, the idea in honest SEO is to make sure that the page design makes it easy for the search engine to index (and make sure that the crawler can find every page) and make sure that the page copy is well-written and descriptive. Honest SEO professionals also do a lot of consulting regarding advertising - such as what keywords to buy and what text to use for the ad.

I see nothing wrong with this approach. What I do have a problem with is dishonest SEO - the so-called "black hat" firms. Dishonest SEO involves anything that tries to misrepresnt the contents of a page to the engine, including things like screwing with the alt text on images (e.g. making it something completely bogus that doesn't match the image at all), hidden links, false keywords / titles, linkspamming, and a whole host of other techniques.

I call goofiness!

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Try to search for information on a specific product, esp. a piece of hardware. In a lot of cases you have to get tricky to see anything in the first page or two (I get 50 results per page) besides lots of sites claiming the lowest price on whatever you're looking for. I love it (NOT) when I see something like "Lowest prices... comparison of ..."; I go there, and there's not even a useful *link* to a comparison.

I'd be *much* happier with google if they gave me a box to click to "turn off shopping sites".