A world without PR, could you survive ?

A marketing dream

[caine]

PR probably the most addictive intellectual narcotic to all in the knowing of its being.
Personally i'm bored with PR, and talk about it, but if a site jumped up just one PR point, i would have a smile for the rest of the day. Though getting deeper into PR, not so much into the statistical modelling that it uses to assess value/rank, but the true meaning of PR in making money, i'm starting to question what exactly a high PR means!

taking a HMI view, individuals personalize their computers, i.e. people with less knowledge of the hardware / software / internet, see their compilation of electronics/glass/plastics as a persona, what the hell is it doing, why is it doing that. Where as the seriously intiated followers of the computer revolution or evolution, look more at it being several interacting systems, that conglomerate via an interaction of data processing and i/o gate switching. What i am saying it is the serious aficionados, use highly specific one / two keyword terms, which PR would be important for, but this happens to be the creators of websites, SEO's, and alike. Where as Joe Bloggs, who may know how to data input, or even make macros in excel, is not going to look upon any of the search engines in the way that PR would be important. They use multiple worded terms, i've found from from my logs the majority of searches are 3, extending upto 6 worded terms, check out the PR on a six worded term for your site, and if you've covered the basics of good SEO, their ain't very many sites, that your will be competing with, hence PR at the extreme of someone looking at the search engine input bar unknowingly like it is a natural language processor, is useless, and as you move closer to single keyword search terms, it suddenly becomes more important, but thats for the initaited web hunter/gatherer.

Another anamoly, that always comes to light once in a while, is how low PR sites, hammer high PR sites on search terms. PR is links, not relevance, hence relevance is the true criteria, and PR is not a good indicator of relevance.

Hence i think i could survive in a world without PR, and am now starting to look at PR as a marketing strategy off G's ad department, too keep everyone on their toes !

[Mike_Mackin]

We build sites with content.
We check our sales stats.
PERIOD

[vitaplease]

Caine, do an exact phrase search in Google for:

"Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results"

and you can see in part who, besides us Pagerank-maniacs is to blame..;)

They had another page with the same text, but recent human intervention seemed to help there: [webmasterworld.com...] (msg 13)

You are right about the frequent use of three word search queries:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Google could do good to nuance the whole Pagerank issue related to ranking a bit more openly by saying Pagerank is a very broad indicator of overall importance of that page. Your specific example of multi-word queries is a good mentionable example, they could then also add the fact from their own Zeitgeist stat-data, that most people now tend to rightly use multi-word queries and thereby get quality results that can overshadow Pagerank as such.

However the Pagerank related workings of their algo are still the main reason why Google stands out from the rest..