**UPDATE**
Chris Garret redirected me to an interesting perspective by Ryan Caldwell in his article in Performancing.com entitled
Does Persistence Always Pay? What to do when a virtual economy is on the verge of collapse.
Thanks to Jenn of NakedPr for her in depth explanations concerning the questions I had yesterday. Jenn calls it “a few of the basics.” but I call it in-depth. So now I know what the big fuss is all about, I think. In a nutshell, Google does not take too kindly to people selling their rank juice to others so they will benefit from the juice.
I don’t know how it works nor how is it calculated, but it so seems that if a high ranking blog links to you, your blog too, will get a higher page rank in the long run. That is what SEO gurus tells me and I believe them. Thus the obsession with every webmasters to have high ranking blogs linking to their sites. So much so that millions are willing to pay for those links and the higher your sites rank, the more you can charge for your links. Now, Mr. Google-stein does not like you doing business that way. It effects the way their Search Results shows up.
Again, I don’t know how it works nor how it is calculated (the more I blog, the more I realize that I an ignorant about lots of things), but, the higher your blog is ranked, the deeper Google Search robots will dig into your Site when a certain keyword is being Searched. So a high ranking blog will get a lot of Search Juice which will in turn increase their Visitor Juice which will then increase the web master’s Income Juice. Boy, that sure is a lot of juices to think of. No wonder, Mr. Google-stein does not like that. Being juiced out like that, I mean. In fact, he despise it so much that there have been talks about abandoning the Ranking System altogether. A quote taken from what Matt Cutts said in his reply to some of the page ranking issues passed to him by forum members at the digitalpoint forum.
As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn’t expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.
So what will happen if indeed Google does away with the Ranking System. Lots of websites is going to loose all their juice. That’s for sure. What then, will happen to all those sites that are links dependant? If there is no rank, then I take that there will be no double standards in Google’s Search Results anymore. If there is no ranking, then all those juicy back links will carry weight or juice no more. Everyone will get the same exposure and I don’t want to loose any more of my crowning glory trying to figure out how Google is going to decide who gets listed the first few pages of their Search Results.
However, little as I know, I see a very exploitable area to classify the prowess of Sites, most particularly for Blog Sites. That is through the number of feeds subscriptions. As it is, at present, most links are sold to Blog Sites as they give the most exposure. So if an Internet Marketeer is looking for exposure to his marketing site, the best bet is to place Ads in Blogs. Since there will be no more rank juice to increase their search juice, the best bet is to place links ads in blog that has a vast readership base and the best indication that a blog has a permanent readership base is their RSS subscription figure.
This should take care of problems. Google will be able to deliver, without prejudice, all relevant results, without fear of a juiced up site that has bought hundreds of links so they can have a high page rank in order to appear in the first page of the Search Results. Advertisers will have a chance to target their customers by placing Ads in Blogs that are most relevant to their products. Popular bloggers will have a field day with Advertisers. Feed Advertising will boom. Every blogger will come up with tips and tricks on how to increase feed subscriptions. Books will be written and sold. Feed tracking sites will be the order of the day and like the planet that we live on that comes a full circle every year, who owns the most influential feed tracking site that almost all bloggers uses to track their feeds? Why, Mr. Google-stein of course!
I assume people who monetize their blogs (like us) are mostly the ones who give a damn about PR and Alexa. The truth is, PPP is bypassing this game with the implementation of Argus. I assume this Argus will give the advertisers real time numbers and stats.
If it works for PPP, I do believe other Paid posts companies will start similar platforms. THis will of course reduce their dependancy on Google and other stats measuring means.
Good or not, I still do not know. One thing for sure, it won’t be as easy in the past getting accepted to write for paid posts without some serious hardwork done to your blogs.
Yea..I agree that it will be tough when Advertisers are looking for quality alone. At present lots are just looking for a back link, so they are willing to pay even if the blog does not have quality content as long as it has a high rank.
My links have been going like hotcakes on Linkworth and TextLinkAds. The pocket is getting fat indeed. I think now business sites are still scrambling to get text links on blogs because of the hoohaa over links in blog directories. Do go spring cleaning and add some colours to your TLA and LinkWorth’s registers. Once one link got sold, many others will start buying. Even my miserable photo blog also have 6-7 links sold. And I am increasing the price every month. LOL.
Lilian, you have always been the lucky one. Hahahahaa… I don’t think I will be able to catch up with you even if I go and sprinkle my blog with honey.
Helen - As it is, LinkWorth is already tracking that. You can find my stats through the sidebar. LinkWorth is ahead of the game, not PPP.
I dont believe Google would suffer in any way if they dropped displaying pagerank. The thing is, they could still use pagerank in their calculation of results even if they didn’t display the result to the rest of us.
You touched upon one of the main problems though…Advertising.
Text Link Ads admitted themselves several months ago that they only use alexa because there aren’t that many alternatives for ranking traffic. At the moment, several advertising networks use pagerank as their main way of ranking a website so if google dropped pagerank you would see a lot of advertising networks put in a very difficult position ie. they wouldnt be able to rank their publishers to potential advertisers. Publishers would suffer greatly.
Enjoyed your post as this is something I try to pay attention to
Kevin
Kevin, Thanks for dropping by and sharing your invaluable opinions. My exact sentiments concerning the Advertising side effects that it will cause.
I don’t think Google will get rid of Page Rank. They may change the name of it some day or not allow us to see it (like they did with supplemental results), but I think Page Rank keeps everyone on their toes. Google wants quality results for their users and when webmasters/bloggers have to continually worry about things like Page Rank and supplemental it kind of ensures that more people will work to provide qaulity web sites/blogs.
The thing that irritates me is that I see many high-quality sites/blogs with fabulous information with very little Page Rank and then I see crappy sites/link farms with a Page Rank of 5 or higher. Only Google knows how PR is evaluated, but I do think it is time to revamp the system a bit.
Melissa. Thanks for sharing your views.Ya. it irritates me too to see some blogs that are so crappy but yet so highly ranked.
Google isn’t going to get rid of PageRank soon, and there are all kind of additional factors in ranking.
I don’t think Google can remove PageRank from the toolbar completely, though they might make it more obfuscated by using a colour coded gradient scale that a human can judge, but would be hard to specify in public - they don’t have to provide a numerical equivalent.
Why wouldn’t they remove it? Because it is a symbol of trust in their algorithms and certainly in my own mind a better indication than that offered currently by compete, though obviously it has its flaws with high-jacking etc.
Thanks Andy. It is always good to hear your views. I guess if they decide to do away with Page Rank, then they will have to work out a whole new algorithm to decide which sites are more valuable huh?
The Matt Cutts quote wasn’t about possibly getting rid of PageRank. He just meant that we shouldn’t expect to see the toolbar PR updated right away. PR constantly changes, but it’s only updated on the toolbar (public page rank) every few months. That’s when people can see if their rank is up or down.
It’s also not so much about search engine rankings. There’s “page rank” and then search engine rankings (placement in the SERPs). Despite what a lot of webmasters believe, Google does say PR is considered, but a lot of other things can get high rankings as well. Getting a high PR is more about getting people to pay more money for your links, getting more people interested in things like sponsored posts, etc… because they want to increase their own pagerank for similar reasons.
Jenn, then I guess having a good page rank does not necessary guarantee get you a good search rank?
Lei duck jor!!!!
That’s right. Good Page Rank doesn’t guarantee good rankings in the SERPs. It’s basically nothing more than a little “badge of honor” for people to brag about something related to their site… and a reason people will pay more for links on your sites (but to appease the Google gods, we’ll pretend I didn’t say that).