Perfect example of PR going wrong!

High PR site, but for the wrong reasons ...

[vmaster]

While searching for a reasonable reseller hosting package using Google, I came across a site with a respectable PR 7, much higher than other cut-price resellers in the marketplace. Quite impressed, I had almost made up my mind to sign up, when a quick checkrevealed that the site had high PR due to many credible sites referring to its poor service and false commitments. Now that was close.

Being a webmaster, I knew how to determine which sites linked to it etc., but I'm sure the average user is not aware of such tools, and would certainly fall for the trap under the impression that high PR is a positive indicator.

While PR simply increases with the number of "votes" for a site, no way does it certify the said votes being positive or negative!

[Dynamoo]

I did a page a couple of months back exposing a scam and deliberately didn't make the links clickable, so I didn't pass on the PageRank. I guess I could have tinkered with Javascript instead, but I didn't want to pass a whole heap of PageRank to a scammer.

However, can you imagine the chaos of "negative vote" links. Blast your opposition off the web! Give Microsoft a PR0! Could be quite cool, in an anarchic sort of way.

[chiyo]

Monkscuba, quoting google.com >>Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank<<

Yep, good point and I defer to your better research!

Yep Google is certainly drawing the long bow to infer that PR = important = quality. They need to fix that up.

[merlin30]

The problem is the term "quality" can not be easily be defined in a measurable way - it is along the lines of beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Chiyo, you make the point that Britney is more popular than Beethoven as proof that you cannot use popular to infer quality. Now, I don't like either Britney or Beethoven (Rush is my scene!), but I cannot really use that as a judgement as to which is quality. There are plenty of Britney fans who will insist that she is by far the superior product.

In business (certainly the one I'm in) quality control usually equates to zero defects. Applied to websites this could mean one with no broken links, no missing images, that resizes perfectly, that doesn't cause you PC to hang and that downloads everytime - but there are planty of sites you would call garbage that fit this profile.

Important is another term that is hard to define - I find lots of information on the web, that is very important to me (technical information, financial information etc) but the web pages providing this information don't always have high PR.

Unfortunately, PR only seems to relate to the (aggregate) number of inbound links to a page.

[Monkscuba]

"Important" is certainly a personal term. Do we feel that our PC's may be able to influence the results that we see on our own personal computers/laptops when we do a Google search or other SE search. As computers become more intelligent some SERP filter on the PC could kick in that causes things that are important to us to appear more highly. The computer can learn what kind of things we search for and build a database of some kind. As the computer does more searches it learns what is important to it's owner. Maybe some smileys could help. If you never want to see a result from crapsite.net again, you click on the sad face, and your computer will always filter it from the SERP's in future. Won't affect public access computers, just our own baby laptops or home computers, and there would always be a switch to revert to normal/personal.

I'm rambling and in need of a beer. Just put down payment on a house today. Mind wandering. But, personal SERP's are not an impossible dream.

[merlin30]

It certainly wouldn't surprise me if someone at Google this very minute was testing an early version of "Google Search Client".

Perhaps this is what Dominic is all about. GG alluded to some great things in store for the future!