Google Page Rank - Are you obsessed with the little green bar?
Either you will ignore it or you will have the habit of checking it consistently. Well, for my case, whenever the computer has the Google toolbar installed in it, I will check it out most of the time. If you are not sure what I am talking about, it is the little green bar on the Google toolbar. And if it still doesn’t ring a bell, that is the indicator of the page rank of that webpage. The page rank is an indication of how valuable that page and the ranking is given by Google. So why are so many people are obsessed with it?
One thing which is more likely to be true is that if your webpage has high pagerank, whatever updates or the posts which you wrote, will be indexed faster than the rest. And that also means your webpage is highly regarded by Google. I mean, what is better than having been highly regarded by the top search engine around? Anyway, besides having your stuffs being indexed faster than your competitors, more webmasters will more likely to contact you to buy a link from your webpage to theirs. That means another revenue for you! Why people want to do that? Well, some of these link buyers are envious that you are having such long green bar. (I am not joking.) They just want Google to think that if the highly regarded webpage were to link to them, then their websites are of some importance too. Before you are thinking of buying links, I will advise you not to do that as Google doesn’t like such things.
That’s another weird part which I don’t understand. If Google really don’t like such things, then why are they putting the pagerank indicator there? Isn’t it better if the indicator isn’t there in the first place, so that nobody will know its own importance and profit from it? And if Google is not intending to remove it, is there more than meets the eye? I don’t know. But I am just guessing that is there some secrets which we are unaware of?
April 28th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
The Pagerank is an indication of how important/trust-worthy your website is according to Google. It doesn’t affect how often you get crawled - I have a PR6 website that doesn’t get crawled as often as a PR4.
Why are webmasters buying links?
It’s generally agrred that your rankings in search results are “mostly” determined by the number of backlinks - not just any backlinks BUT relevant and trust-worthy ones.
Since the Pagerank indicates the “trust-worthiness” of a site, getting a link from a high Pagerank site counts towards a bigger vote - hence, the buying of high Pagerank links.
The reason why Google put the Pagerank in the toolbar was to let users know what they (Google) thought of a webpage, i.e. it was not meant for webmasters to “game” the search results. The Pagerank is updated only once in every 3-4 months, hence it really isn’t very useful because Google themselves use a seperate internal Pagerank that is constantly updated.
April 29th, 2007 at 10:03 am
It is true that having relevant and trust-worthy backlinks will help in the ranking. In fact, if the site had been linked to irrelevant or some spammed sites, Google will give the site a lower ranking. (This might be true for some free advertising websites.)
Also, if you have links to other website, do check out if the links are still relevant and existing, because you wouldnt like to be linked to some spammed sites too.
Perhaps, the pagerank in the toolbar is just an indication, but it just looked suspicious to me, because if there are difference in different websites, then there might be something which can be exploited. It is just my opinion.