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The Google Toolbar PageRank Demystified

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

17 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. What's SEO? by ebcdic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Evidently readers of the referenced article are expected to be familiar with this acronym, but why is Slashdot assuming that its readers are?

    1. Re:What's SEO? by chris_mahan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ah, but that would not work.

      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 customers.

      These people of course do not realize that google does not want that to happen so that they keep tweaking the search engine to drop the crap sites.

      This is the perfect "nerd revenge" if you ask me.

      --

      "Piter, too, is dead."

    2. Re:What's SEO? by emurphy42 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I call shenanigans! Give us some specific examples of searches that are 99% spam. Not to be hypocritical, here are some searches that I believe are way the hell less than 99% spam:
    3. Re:What's SEO? by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, of course! But that's what an SEO expert really accomplishes - if you tell management, "We should rewrite our copy and redesign our link structure to improve usability", you probably won't get much of a response. If, on the other hand, you tell management, "We should rewrite our copy and redesign our link structure to improve our ranking and get more hits", then you're talking.

      Of course, SEO goes beyond that - things like code quality can have a major impact as well.

  2. Demystified? by neonprimetime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Google Toolbar PageRank Demystified ?????

    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;

    1. Re:Demystified? by thsths · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > I like the summary though at the end of the article : Make your own conclusions;

      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.

  3. Google toolbar? by baomike · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What's this? Maybe this only concerns people who have or are infected with a "google tool bar".

  4. Useless Search Engine Optimization Blather by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This guy said nothing in a long tedious way.

  5. Of course not by Billosaur · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As penned by SE Guru Mike Grehan,

    "Can you imagine some surfer finding the digital camera of his dreams at a knock-down bargain price but refusing to buy it because the page it's on only has a PR of one? I don't think so."

    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.

    --
    GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
    1. Re:Of course not by raoul666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

      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. White supremacists would say yes.

      --
      When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
    2. Re:Of course not by nuckfuts · · Score: 3, 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 and HotBot 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 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 for it.

      It's true that PageRank has it's own problems, and that content spamming has been largely replaced by link spamming. Still, things are much better these days than before Google came around.

  6. Re:Nooooo! by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Pagerank became useless a long time ago, after spammers began their largely successful war of attrition against the Google Pagerank engineers. Google is not the tool it was.

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
  7. Best way to get ranked higher... by blake213 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Create a useful and unique web page/business, and you will appear at the top of the list. Anything else is just cheating, and it's exactly what Google is trying to prevent.

    --
    mund freud.
  8. Do I understand this argument correctly? by Darkforge · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The gist of this article seems to be:

    Hello, I'm a sleazy SEO with poor grammar and spelling. It's my job to trick Google (using link spam) into thinking that a web site is more important than it actually is.

    Now, many of my customers think that the Google Toolbar will tell them their PageRank, and that this will tell them how good a job I'm doing. I wish they would stop looking at this number, because using that they can see how useless my services are and how effectively Google is combatting my tactics.

    Here, let me quote a few irrelevant remarks out of context: "If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit."

    In short, don't pay me to raise your PageRank, [because only improving site quality can do that,] but instead pay me for "targetted traffic", which you can't measure, but is really much more important! Yuk yuk yuk!
    --

    When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!

  9. Wow by gumbo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you've looked at the SEO world at all, you know that there are lots of people who write half-assed articles so they can have more unique content on their web site. Or, they offer those articles up to other sites to get links back to their site. The articles never really say anything, and are just an attempt to build up traffic.

    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.

  10. Re:It's not that simple by Kent+Recal · · Score: 2, Insightful
    when I'm just one fish in a giant ocean?

    be the best fish. the only fish that one will ever need.
    it's as easy as that, nemo.
  11. SEO = BS by rakerman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've said it before and I'll say it again: SEO is bullshit.
    You want good rank and good hits? Write good content.