Pagerank

Pagerank is not important.

Pagerank is not important.

Ignore it now!

WHy isn't it important, I hear you cry. Easy.

1. Public (toolbar) pagerank is utterly useless, unless you're selling links. Ignore it if you're buying. There isn't much you can do as a result of your pagerank - it's not something that generates actions for you. It's a scaling of a massive log-distributed curve into a 0-10 integer scale, plus an N/A value, and up to 4 months out of date at any one time. What on earth are you going to do with that?


2. Although pagerank might buoy your rankings in Google, you'll never be able to define the precise effect of the pagerank of a single page.


3. If you do raise your pagerank, the main effect will be that you simply hve higher pagerank, and not neccessarily have higher rankings, or traffic, or money. Just a higher number in a toolbar.


4. It's really far too easy to pick up bought links, unless they're very well placed. Why buy a link in an effort to raise pagerank?


5. Google listings (shock) aren't ordered by pagerank.


6. Pagerank's not hugely important. I'd say, roughly 30% of your overall ranking score, based on nothing in particular. After all, it's just an openly disclosed algorithm for valuing links, inbound and outbound, based on a method for ranking academic papers; it doesn't see spam, or topics.


7. Please ignore forum morons who say that a PR7 link will give them PR+1. Or forum morons who ask if two PR6 links will give them PR4. These questions indicated a need for immediate education - send them to the formal description / specification of pagerank. It's published by Google themselves, so they can just shut right up.

Thanks, that's all for today.