Killing Google PageRank: Making Relevancy Irrelevant
This is old news, but a while ago on TW I posted that UPI, a 100 year old company, was overtly selling PageRank, even mentioning PageRank on their advertisement pages. Search works so well because they measure relevancy using things that are hard to manipulate or things that people wouldn't generally think to manipulate. Thus, if a 100 year old slow moving company is doing something you know that the method of relevancy they aim to manipulate is generally likely already dead.
Google will likely filter out overt link buys like this
especially when they are marketed this aggressively on Google's own ad network
If a link buy is so overt that people would talk about it, then an engineer or algorithm has probably caught it already. But that sort of example can be seen as a proxy for the market as a whole, and Google have also significantly lowered the weighting on raw PageRank scores over the past few years, because too many people know about it and manipulate it. Just looking at PageRank is nearly as useless as a meta keywords tag.
Comments
It's true that the little text links aren't going to drive much traffic, but if it's from a high PR site and it's anchored with a keyword then it's going to count for a lot. And the passed on PR will help but only if it's on there for a long time... like a year or something.
Google has long since been able to filter out obvious paid links like the ones listed in that example. The fact that they come from a high PageRank site only means that they stick out even worse and are more obvious.
But if you had a sports gambling website you'd love that co-ciation...but if you're not....kinda sucks.
Actually, from my experience, meta keywords are quite relevant. I score well for niche, but still searched for keywords just based on that tag!
I’ve been thinking about this for sometime now especially because if link buying demand goes down I stand to loose a lot of Money. Will it be worth while buying links even though they don’t count for SERP’s? Now that’s the question in my head.
Part of the problem is Google has done so well cobranding itself with PageRank in that people stil think it's all Google is about. Combine that with outdated forum posts and articles and PR is going to be with us for awhile like it or not.
Chances are this specific company really believes that PageRank is that important, but for many selling links based on PageRank, the simple reason is as long as someone will buy it, someone will sell it.
"Part of the problem is Google has done so well cobranding itself with PageRank in that people still think it's all Google is about. Combine that with outdated forum posts and articles and PR is going to be with us for awhile like it or not."
Good point.
A mid order PageRank is like hitting 100 in your car. It's not that hard getting there, but it can be tricky staying there.
And sometimes, going any faster requires either a new engine, or a new car all together.
PageRank is just a bi-product of some of things SOE's do, but it's not a measurement of everything they do.
There's a lot to be said for driving traffic with good, old-fashioned 'off-line' marketing, too!
Emperor,
Those 'text only' links at the bottom of a page labeled as advertising are almost useless for driving traffic. So, without the relevancy benefits, they're useless. An embedded text link in the content or a Text & Graphic Ad in the Top Left of a page could drive relevant and significant traffic. It seems most publishers are not willing to sell the most valuable space at a justifiable price.
Aaron,
I would agree with Wayne that you make a good point regarding PageRank being outdated. PageRank is still relevant, but only as a gauge, a thermometer if you will, like Alexa rankings.
The name of the game is organic placement, I would rather have a consistent #1 in my keywords with a PR1 than a PR8 invisible in search.
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