Info Vilesilencer Directory Owners Forum and Free Directory List » Lounges » The Comfy Lounge

[drwebs]

Rant on PR and websites forced to care about it. This is not geared towards anyone. And I had no one in mind when writing it.

When people demand pagerank and we cave in and give it, we will keep this old model around. As long as we give in to demands, we will always be bound to the ones giving them. I'm waiting for the day a community pops up that has the strength to say who cares about PR.

klout, PageRank all those tools that "rank" people based on random algorithmic properties. You can build a website for search engines or humans. If you build one for humans, then that is what you will get. I can SEO all day, in the end once someone lands on my nonsensical gibberish built for search engines page they will leave.

It's like spinning article text, sure you can write 1000 articles in 10 seconds. No one can read them, and no one will.

If you rank a persons life based on what a website tells them, to me, that is messed up. My klout is only 10, so people with a klout of 20 feel like they are better people. We are adopting this theory that the website can rank the quality of life, grandma's Klout is 5, we best remove her from our webpage.

[Dan]

The worst thing we do in life is generalise.

In any given community, industry or walk-of-life there are good and bad instances of people and businesses.

Pagerank, like any ranking system, seeks to generalise by lumping "like" things together. Heck IVS is a generalisation of what directories are. There are so many scalable examples of directories, which when you put them side-by-side look nothing alike, but we still lump them together and call them the same thing.

I do like the idea of a pagerank-less web. It is now so deep-seeded and Google made a choice to keep PR and do algorithm changes to flush out the scams, instead of scrapping PR and killing the scams outright.

It did this out of fear. It's made many decisions out of fear that could be considered in hindsight to be the wrong decisions.

If Google flipped the switch on TBPR, what would happen straight away is the death of pagerank selling. Why doesn't Google do it then? Because they stand to lose the most from doing that.

Pagerank drives their business model. Without it, they don't have a magical number to aid them in soft-selling to people. Pagerank IS a soft-sell. A company doesn't need to know a single thing about you... Oh you have a PR5 on your homepage, cool can we buy a link? Ummm don't you want to know what we do first? Ummm not really can we buy a PR5 link please? But our businesses aren't related, and we don't even sell links! Ummmm look, we like your PR5, we love your PR5, can we buy a link from your PR5?

And round and round we go...

Content gets talked about as being king, and for humans it should be, but whilst people run around (they still do) chasing this stupid little number, we will never win them by good content alone.

[drwebs]

Yeah I am with ya on the rank bit.

Checkout this klout site.

http://klout.com/#/SecWhDirectory

I guess I have a 50 now, I was a 10. What the F**k does that even mean lol??

[Dan]

No idea on the Klout stuff. I do have an account that I've never used

[YMC]

I think PR was a good idea at its inception. Making it visible is where Google went wrong.

I used to work for the Navy. At one time, they had to report the cost of inter-departmental meetings. The way they did it was through sign-in sheets. You were required to put your name and rank (a number between 1 and 15). While everyone in the room knew that the attendees had been hand-picked based on their knowledge and skills, it still often degraded into the childish non-sense of "I'm a GS-12 and you're just a GS-7, why should I listen to you?" It didn't matter that the GS-7 was an airplane mechanic with 25 years of experience and the arrogant bastard was an 23-year-old engineer weeny a year out of college.

Payscale was a horrendous way to evaluate the value of someone's contributions just as PR is.

The problem in evaluating anything's value electronically is that you have to come up with some sort of measurable scoring system. Once people know how to manipulate the scores, the system becomes worthless.

In my mind, the only people who actually evaluate a site's value by it's PR are webmasters and SEO'ers. The general populace still thinks PR stands for public relations and don't have plugins that show that green bar anyway - the very folks most sites should be written for anyway.

[Watchdog]

Google PageRank was always destined to fail. It is a meaningless trophy used by a handful of people to make money out of sitting on their backsides. People who spend their lives buying and selling links on the grand scale required to get a high PR are missing the point of owning a website. From its earliest times it proved to be quite corruptable and large numbers of people still seem to be fascinated by it even though it does next to nothing these days. Whilst I am not a community, just a member of several of them, I'll make Dr Webs happy by saying that I do not care for PR at all and I have never been more certain of anything in my life. If it left the scene tomorrow it wouldn't be a day too soon.

In fact, it has been some years since I even bothered to check PageRank relating to any website I own or control. One of my websites has been at the top of search engines for years without having a high PR and Google even gave that site a PR of nought at one stage because I had the words "sponsored links" in the sidebar there yet the site still enjoyed top placing. I guess it demonstrates the meaningless nature of PR at the end of the day, especially when hard work is put into the quality of the site's content. The one thing that gives PR any lattitude in my eyes is that I dislike the Hitleresque nature of Google itself even more.

[drwebs]

Hey I never meant for this to get that serious, but now at least we all found the community that does not like the page rank Well said all, I like each persons take on a dated medium.

[Snakeair]

I haven't checked my PR in years and it's just a stinking number.

As long as i'm still getting good traffic and seeing it increase, PR can go #$!# itself. (Sorry for language Dan)

I have an klout account but have no clue what the number mean's. lol

If people want to advertise on your website, you don't make the sale with saying your PR number, you usually make the sale showing your traffic stat's. If i buy advertising somewhere online, I look for sites that get a lot of unique hits each week to get more bang for my buck. I don't need to build backlinks to only go for PR, I look for ways to get traffic.

[Dan]

I've seen a lot of SEOs tout klout. (that rhymes! )

It is so easily gamed and doesn't really represent anything, that I believe anyone pushing it to be considered seriously, is someone that has gamed it, made themselves look influential, and now wants the site to be considered influential so their star can rise.

I don't think it has the same cred as Linkedin, which offers a more serious networking possibility (though I've seen it abused too).