Tuesday, November 06, 2007 Robillo: Google PageRank, bad for PR? By Oliver Robillo IT Talks
AS I'M not deeply into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and such, I kept mum when the hullabaloo over the seesawing of Google's PageRank system washed over the blogosphere late last month.
My homebase blog, Blogie Blog (robilloblog.com) -- after having been pinned with a PR4 from 0 in May -- suddenly went one notch down, and then back up again after a few days, and then is now at PR2. Same thing happened with my IT talks! (ittalks.co.cc) blog.
AngDabawenyo.com suffered one point, after landing a PR5 in just 3 months of existence in May. MindanaoBloggers.com enjoyed the same leap from 0 to 5 as my I-love-Davao blog, in just as many months from site launch. The Davao Blogspace (davaoblogs.com) is still at PR4.
What's curious is Google's ranking of the DVO Bloggers Network blog (davaoblogs.net), which runs on Google Apps. It's fairly new, starting only in July 2007, and it doesn't have very many incoming links, and still has only a few feed subscribers -- probably because the posts are erratic and far between. But it got a PR4 from scratch.
I've often heard bloggers and SEO practitioners speak of PageRank in almost hushed tones, like it was the Holy Grail. Perhaps in some ways it is. Bloggers all over the world covet it. Furthermore, nobody outside of Google knows exactly what algorithms or heuristics are employed to determine a website's PR value. And that's probably what propagated the mystery and all its attendant allure and fascination.
In my opinion, PageRank is highly arbitrary. The statement by Matt Cutts, Google's go-to guy on SEO issues, confirmed it for me. He said, "The partial update to visible PageRank ... was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site."
Google used to be the new kid on the block. Has it now turned into a bully...? Apparently, the people at Google dislike paid links. I won't pretend to understand why, but I believe it has something to do with "gaming" the search engine.
I don't mean to sound simple, but what has the Big G got to do with my decision to sell links on my blog? (By the way, my homebase blog and info-tech blogs do not have paid links, but AngDabawenyo.com does. Go figure!)
In my opinion, what should matter to bloggers is his or her content and how it's being received by readers and subscribers. Are the readers leaving comments or trackbacks? Are they subscribing to feeds? To probloggers especially, what should be more critical is not PageRank but actual site traffic.
So, is a low PR value bad for your blog's public relations? I admit, to those who put too much of a premium on artificial metrics, your blog might appear 'unimportant' if it had a low ranking. But to those who see your content for its true value, at the end of the day, PageRank is just a number.
