You’d be suprised at some of the answers I get to questions I post on the webuildpages.com contact form.
A few days ago one guy asked me how many links we can get in an hour….needless to say, what he was seeking, we’re not selling.
Yesterday someone filled our our form stating that he was seeking hundreds of "quality relevant links" but they needed to be at least all from "PageRank 4 or higher pages". Since it’s being reported that Google’s updating their Green Fairy Dust today, it looks like a good day to dispel some Pagerank Myths.
I’m kind of suprised at how many people are still stuck in some SEO technique timewarp of what was effective in 1999. For those of you who weren’t into SEO in the 90’s, I’ll give you a brief story of why there’s the thought that links from PR4 or higher pages are ones that "count".
Traveling back to the 90’s and early 2000’s….back when there were these monthy Google Dances. Back then, about once a month, there’d be a big shuffle in rankings….and those rankings would stay pretty stable for the month, until the next dance day. On the Google Dance day, not only would rankings shift, but so too would the Google Toolbar. Pagerank would update accross the board, and the backlinks numbers would also change….and they were mostly accurate except for 1 thing.
The one inaccuracy was that Google would only show backlinks that came from pages that were at least a Pagerank 4 or higher (so we’d all work to get our links pages to at least a PR4 so people would trade with us…hehe, silly us). Our misguided thought back then was that links from pages that were below a Pagerank 4 must be worthless since Google didn’t show those….the toolbar fairydust SEO manipulation had already started back then….but most of us just didn’t know it. (Meaning I’m sure that links from PR0 - 3 were counting….we just didn’t know it (I’m guilty)).
Now, in 2007 rankings change daily, Pagerank updates about every 3-6 months…and is based on a score calculated 3-6 months prior to the updating day….saying that Pagerank is Stale is an understatement….also saying that pagerank effects rankings is a lie.
One of my link team Ninjas was showing me an email they got back from someone stating something to the effect of:
"I can tell that you don’t know about SEO, so let me give you some lessons. The page you’re requesting an ad on doesn’t have Pagerank yet, so there’s no value. I can put your ad on our links page that is a Pagerank 4 since there’s much more value there."
our response was something like:
"I’m not sure what pagerank is, but the page I requested is really the one we’d really like the ad on. We think visitors to that page will find this ad relevant and will click through to this advertisor…. (and then we proceeded to get this ad for a "Ninja steal").
Pagerank 0… SO WHAT I say! Our ninjas don’t look at Pagerank….we’re not puppets on Google’s Pagerank Strings.
This particular page was about 2 months old….it wasn’t showing fairy dust (pagerank) yet….but it had a cache from the day prior and it had around 50 backlinks from other sites to that exact page. It was a quality page, it was relevant to our client, and our ad should get some clicks as well…. the fact that it was a pagerank 0 doesn’t mean squat to me.
Does it mean anything to you?
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