PageRank is hurting the blogosphere
Tony Hung over at The Blog Herald gave quite a few bloggers a real scare yesterday. It did indeed appear that Google had dropped everyone’s PageRank to zero, which would have been interested to say the least.
I believe the blogosphere is too focused on PageRank, and it’s advertising services such as Text Link Ads fault.
Personally, I’ve got nothing against buying and selling text links, it’s an ad like everything else. I do prefer relevant ads on my sites, so just because a car company wants to SEO their way to the top doesn’t mean that I want them advertising with me. At least not as long as I’ve got the luxury of advertisers lined up to take their place.
Which most of us don’t.
So what if bought text links usually are just for Google juice, if it brings in the dollars needed to keep a blog floating? So what?
Well, Google is what. They don’t like it, and they recently slammed down on a lot of sites, devaluing their PageRank. This hurts, because a lot of things are controlled by your PageRank. You can’t even get into Text Link Ads (or you could, I guess, but you probably won’t) unless you’ve got PR4 (out of 10, you know that!), and a lot of publishers believe that they won’t be able to make money until they’ve got a decent PageRank.
The really big problem with PageRank and the way the blogosphere sees it, in my opinion, is how it’s used to value a blog’s worth when buying and selling. A high PageRank means a higher price.
I think it’s silly. There are a lot of other things to take into account when it comes to buying or selling a domain. In my opinion, PageRank is a metric that hurts the blogosphere. It’s controlled by a company with their own motives, and it takes the focus from a more relevant things.
Such as great content. Good design. Monthly revenue. Strong brands. Spinoff services, projects, and earnings. Possible evolution of the site/blog.
I can understand why EatonWeb is valuing PageRank less after the recent text links slamdown. It’s a search engine metric, nothing more, and nothing less.
PageRank isn’t a value for success. The sooner the blogosphere starts to align to that point of view, the better.
Spot on Scrivs, spot on.
But the million dollar question lies; can we bring back the good old days before PR dominated everyone’s wallets?
Can something NEW take PR’s place? Now there’s an idea …
By Jamsi on November 20, 2007 2:27 am
And .. you can tell I haven’t visited here in awhile.
Sorry Thord, I didn’t realize it was you posting :)
By Jamsi on November 20, 2007 2:29 am
No worries, Jamsi. :)
Hang on to that thought. What could take PageRank’s place?
By Thord Daniel Hedengren on November 20, 2007 11:31 pm
PR is here to stay - it is embedded too deep in webmaster pysche. Google are blinkered about advertising unless you are using Adsense / Adwords because they “think” you are manipulating the rankings instead looking for revenue. Why should we have to use “nofollow”?
By Business Links on January 9, 2008 5:43 am
It’s funny, there always seems to be a financial motive behind offering advice. If you can convinence a person to perform a given action, buy this, go here, try that, the intention is motivated by the desire. I’m here to promote my site. What more can I say.
By adamcpennington on February 29, 2008 9:33 am