Link Blog

There are so many opinions on this and personally I think they are all right in some respects. PageRank is no longer the creature it once was. There has been a very definite change in the way Google treats a sites PR. However, that is not to say that there is no value in the PageRank of a site.

In many cases a site's PageRank is the first indicator that I use to determine whether or not to research the site for linking. Generally, the PR of a site can tell you a lot about the past practices or lack of practices of a site. By looking at the PageRank that a site has you can get a general idea of how Google feels about the site. For instance, when I see a site with no PR or a gray bar, I know right away one of two things:

1. It is a brand new site.
2. The site has either participated in nefarious activities OR has not participated in ANY activities.

This is not always true, but it is right more than it's wrong.

On the flip side there are several sites that have a decent PageRank that are not necessarily a quality link. Just because a site has a PR of 7 doesn't mean that it is "trusted". The major search services are shifting more and more focus on TrustRank. TrustRank is a way for technology to capitalize on human reviewed data.

Here is a link to the technical outline of TrustRank.

"Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine's results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites."

Does this mean PageRank is dead? In my opinion, no it's not dead, but it is evolving into a much more sophisticated animal. The Google toolbar allows for a "glimpse" at what is really going on with a site, but to determine the actual value of a site, sleeves need to be rolled up and elbow grease should be applied.

When I am evaluating a site, these are typically the initial steps I follow:

1. Establish the PR
2. Check the backlinks using MSN and/or Yahoo! (These two engines give a MUCH truer picture of who is actually linking to the site. Google only shows sites providing links with a PR 3 or higher. Than can literally limit thousands of results and since a site can have a low PR and still be trusted it is important to know all of the sites that are providing links.) During this process I pay close attention to how many directories have the site listed as well as any links from .gov, .org and .edu sites. (Be careful when evaluating the .org and .edu sites sometimes they are not what you think they are. Many people scour for abandoned sites, such as these, sites that would have been trusted. If a site like this falls into the wrong hands the trust associated with the site is shot.)
3. Establish the age of the site by using WhoIs

There are several different factors that will come into play but those are the top three things that I check before going any further. If they can't pass those three little things there is no point, in my mind, in wasting any more time researching them.

Of course, I am not the only person with an opinion. Here are some other articles to help you form your own opinion on this topic.

• What Price PageRank?
  This article was written by Mike Grehan the founder and CEO of Smart Interactive Ltd. He's recognized as one of the foremost SEM experts and is the author of multiple books and white papers on the topic.
• Google Page Rank Dead?
  This is an article from Lee Odden, President of TopRank Online Marketing, a search marketing agency that provides search engine optimization, online public relations and blog marketing services. TopRank has been recognized as a leading SEO firm by TopSEOs.com and PromotionWorld and has been the only Minnesota search engine optimization firm included in Marketing Sherpa’s guide to SEO firms for the past 2 years.
• Is Page Rank Dead?
  An insightful discussion on the evolution of PageRank.
• Google's Page Rank Is Dead - Or Is It?
  Martin Lemieux of SmartAds Newsletter present his view on the topic. As an Internet marketing professional, Lemieux has truly made his mark on the industry. His weekly tips are published on thousands of websites worldwide; his articles are truly unique, helpful and simple to implement. Many top Internet marketing news centers have published more than one of Lemieux's marketing tips over the last year.

Until next time,
LinkQueen

P.S. Here is a tip:
Experience has shown us that placing Google Adsense, or Yahoo! Publisher Network code on your pages will help them be spidered faster.