Slashdot Log In
The Google Toolbar PageRank Demystified
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jul 24, 2006 10:46 AM
from the might-still-be-myth-and-rumor dept.
from the might-still-be-myth-and-rumor dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
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)
Parent
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.
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.
Parent
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)
Parent
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".
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: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)
Parent
Re:What's SEO? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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.
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: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.
Parent
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...
Parent
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:5, Funny)
He should be in marketing... oh, wait... nevermind.
Parent
Demystified, my arse.... (Score:2)
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: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: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.
Parent
Re:Of course not (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
tfa demystified (Score:2)
Seriously, why did I even bother to give my eyeballs to that article?
/. 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)
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.
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.
SEO = BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You want good rank and good hits? Write good content.