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- One Customer Success at a Time Google Toolbar PageRank
only for entertainment purposes? Article
provided by Axandra
Last week, two statements about
Google's PageRank started a new discussion about this topic.
The first statement was made
in the Search Engine Watch forums. It was from a person who
received the following answer to a PageRank question from
a Google employee:
"The
PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for
entertainment
purposes only.
Due to repeated attempts by
hackers to access this data, Google updates the PageRank
data very infrequently because is it not secure. On average,
the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is several
months old.
If the toolbar is showing a
PR of zero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL
that hasn't been updated in the last update.
The PR that is displayed by
the Google Toolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank
the webpage results so there is no need to be concerned if
your PR is displayed as zero.
If a site is
showing up in the search results, it doesn't not have a real
PR of zero, the
Toolbar is just out of date"
In another forum, a person with
the name GoogleGuy, who is believed to a Google employee,
made the following statement:
"I'd
strongly disagree with the statement that the toolbar PageRank
is for 'entertainment
purposes only'--millions of toolbar users use the PageRank
display to judge the quality of pages.
I think it's
also a little irresponsible to quote John Galt claiming to
talk to some random person
at Google, and then for you to quote it as a response from
Google, which makes it sound more official. I'm happy to
refute that this is any sort of official stance."
GoogleGuy didn't say that the
comments in the first statement are wrong. He said that toolbar
users use the PageRank display to judge the quality of web
pages. He did not say that Google uses the number of the
PageRank toolbar to rank web pages.
The PageRank feature is also
no longer mentioned in the official Google toolbar tour.
What does this mean to you?
Of course, PageRank is important
to get good rankings on Google. However, the PageRank number
that is displayed in the Google Toolbar and the green PageRank
bar are not important at all for good Google rankings.
It's very likely that the PageRank
number that can be seen in the Google Toolbar is mainly a
marketing instrument for Google that doesn't have much effect
on the search results. Google seems to use an internal PageRank
value for its ranking algorithm and a public PageRank value
for the toolbar.
That would explain why many web
pages with a high ranking on Google have a low (toolbar)
PageRank.
When you want to trade links
with another web site, don't look at the PageRank of that
site. Instead, ask yourself: Is the web site related to your
site? Would it make sense for web surfers if they linked
to you and you linked to them? Could visitors of the other
web site be interested in your site? If you find a web site
that you would want to visit or your visitors would want
to visit then link to it and ask for a link back to your
site.
Just use common sense. If you
like a page, changes are that other people also like that
page, no matter what PageRank the Google toolbar displays.
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