PlusOne – Marketing Musings

With the Google Big Daddy data centre and Page Rank update completed, many website owners are rejoicing at their newly aquired Page Rank. Of course there are some who are lamenting a downward adjustment, but it appears Page Rank lives on.

The phenomenon of Page Rank is one that has occupied the minds and time of webmasters around the world, tweaking site and furiously linking to improve their PR. There are those who say Page Rank is closely linked with search engine position results, while another army of pundits says page rank matters zilch when it comes to where you appear on the search results.

To them, Page Rank is dead and everybody should ignore it.

But regardless of what you think about Page Rank, the fact is that it still plays an important role in the psychology of webmasters. In fact, Page Rank has a value – almost being a currency of its own.

Take for example the process of exchanging links.

Many ‘experts’ say that full-blown reciprocal linking is out – that we should only be linking with quality sites. But how does one judge quality? Certainly one cannot judge by appearance.

Some of the best sites are ugly. They have great content, are focussed, easy to navigate and meet customers needs.

Others, not so good may have had bucket loads of cash invested in them and look amazing, but are little more that repositories of bought content, scraped articles or page after page of RSS feeds.

So for the average webmaster the eye soon travels to the PR bar to see how much green is showing. Why? Simply because for the average time-strapped human, this is an easy way to ‘judge’ a site’s ‘value’. It supposedly tells us the site’s worth – almost like a currency. The higher the PR, the greater the site is worth.

There are endless arguments about PR gain and PR leakage. The theory is that to increase your PR, you should only link with sites that have a high PR. So what happens in the situation where my site is PR2, and yours is PR5. Does that mean yours is a better site? By you linking to me, will your site suffer?

But wait. Can we trust Google to get it right? Is PR a fair estimation of the quality of a website?

Perhaps we should step back and evaluate sites by what they contain and how they appeal to us as humans. Are the website owners providing legitimate information. Are you comfortable in sending your visitors to that site, because your site and your business will be judged by your recommendation.

It would be nice if we could take this approach with honesty and freshness and avoid comparing the size of our PR’s. After all, like most things in life, size does not really matter, its what you do with it that counts.

Technorati tags: page rank | google | Big Daddy | SEO

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