Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I think this will be both good and bad news for a lot of webmasters.
Can anyone please "confirm" this? What are your thoughts?
Thanks!
The talk you heard about of Google eliminating PageRank soon seems quite odd, in my opinion.
<I've been hearing a lot of talk recently that Google has plans to eliminate the sandbox effect and PageRank system..."soon".>
You don't need to be "hearing" if you just read my msg #:3 of May 2, 2005 - in the following thread. Here it is again:
"Honestly I think that the "old" Google PR system has been dead since 3rd Feb 2005."
[webmasterworld.com...]
But having said that I guess that a new PR system is emerging with different variables than the first one.
Its not a quantitative one as before, but a solid qualitative system. I.e it isn't the number of backlinks but the quality of them which shall be of importance.
As to the sandbox, its difficult to imagine Google to eliminate the sandbox "aging delay" without implementing something better instead. I.e some kind of filter to prevent spamming the serps with thousands of sites which have no real values other than for example serving as "slaves" for other sites.
I seriously doubt this is the case. By definition, if it isn't quantitative it isn't PR. HOWEVER, I have little doubt that Google has turned the PR knob on the algo machine way down. IOW, PR still exists. It is just FAR less important than it used to be. PR is just too easy to manipulate. Just buy some text links on high PR amateur sites, and BAM your site has good PR. The cost of doing this is chicken feed to commercial site that makes a lot of money.
But having said that I guess that a new PR system is emerging with different variables than the first one.
Its not a quantitative one as before, but a solid qualitative system. I.e it isn't the number of backlinks but the quality of them which shall be of importance.
I would say you are right, except the new "system" I'm seeing is that a lot of spammers are ranking higher then those with whitehat SEO.
I thoroughly checked out the 10 top ranking sites for a popular 3 word phrase and 8 of the top 10 were using different spam techniques than I've seen before.
There were several 7PR sites with under 10 links. And most of the sites were ranking for inside pages and not the home page, which was suspicious, so I checked them all.
One of them which ranks highly for most terms in this field overused the image tags for one word-189 times, the link text with another word 210 times and also filled the keyword tag with another word 39 times.
Other sites had up to 33% keyword density for words in that phrase, but not for the 3 words together.
In other words, the results are full of spam. And this is probably affecting the "sandbox". But of course we already know that.
By dropping PR, or dropping the sandbox filters they would cause a massive change in the SERPs; I don't see any massive overnight changes happening with G for some time considering what I said above. The sandbox mechanism really makes swift across the board changes less likely.
The TrustRank paper was published on March 1, 2004 (about the time the "sandbox effect" was first noticed!) and the patent app was filed March 16, 2005.
<TrustRank seems to be an extension of or a refinement to PageRank.>
PageRank is only part of possible new algos which might be based on a combination of United States Patent Application: #20050071741, TrustRank and applications like My Search History (Beta) and Web Accelerator (Beta) and several more applications yet to come.
The applications main function is to help collecting historical data. In addition Google might already be using part of AdSense tracking data on publishers sites for the same purpose.
