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In my mind, we need to recognize this as a reminder that effective, long-term marketing (the only kind that's actually helpful in most cases) is based on fairly simple principles: relevance, targeted demographic reach and of course, ROI.
Google's algo may have been a PART of that strategy, but it should certainly not be the lifeblood of internet marketing.
Besides, Google has been so busy trying to re-invent itself for a variety of reasons (seo manipulation, trying to appease investors, continually updating adsense/adwords to improve performance, etc.) that it's actual performance as a SEARCH engine has suffered.
Personally, I find Yahoo Search, and sometimes even MSN search far more accurate and relevent for most queries.
That alone should flare up red flags all over the place. Sure Google is "god" now... but even Google will not survive if it doesn't do it's job.
Just a few thoughts...
-C
But considering that half of the webmasters that have bought links for me are now saying I'm banned and they won't buy links from me again don't know squat about PR and it's effects on SERP's, I'm begging to freak out a little bit!
I am willing to bet that for every webmaster that knows this is not the end of the Internet, 10 others will start scraching their eyeballs out thinking they have been banned and won't get a paycheck next month.
Although my sites aren't big shots, I wouldn't mind a little bit of courtesy from Google telling us what is going on (you know, from one net business to another).
Let it die a qucik death...and take all the PR sellers with it.
I don't sell links for their PR value, but many webmasters buy them just for that! I actually base my price on the number of unique views a certain page gets - and I think many good webmasters do the same. After all this is the logical thing to do from my point of view.
[edited by: cflorin at 11:12 am (utc) on May 30, 2005]
The most advantage of it is to destroy of 'fake' authority and hierarchy. Every site is born to be equal. No PR values would make for changing links easier than before. This would send webmasters back to focus on construction of their own websites.
Did you notice it?
I have had pages crawled on the 20th that no longer appear in the index....(Ok- pages come and go and I should expand on this but going out now)
Its all a bit weird
[edited by: Dayo_UK at 11:34 am (utc) on May 30, 2005]
Although it is a little disconcerting to think about all our visitors who have the toolbar installed to suddenly think something has gone drastically wrong with our site and it's no longer any good...
I don't sell links for their PR value, but many webmasters buy them just for that! I actually base my price on the number of unique views a certain page gets - and I think many good webmasters do the same. After all this is the logical thing to do from my point of view.
likewise, i sell advertising space which some advertisers choose to put textlinks in, obviously they are after the pr aswell as the traffic i send them, it would annoy me if they left just because pr has gone and imagine if PR really has gone then i will lose some, but as i said i send them lots of traffic they are getting a good ROI, the sensible ones will stay (i hope :( )
