Showing PR

It was a mistake.

[Wired Suzanne]

Seen on a linking page:

"We exchange links with those sites that have green or gray toolbar only"

Thanks to the PR shown on the Toolbar....

[Morgan]

I'm glad that's obvious to you, but it's obvious to me that this is a miscommunication and not worth arguing about. I was saying PR has nothing to do with an industry, it does not show how highly regarded a site is within an industry, because it has absolutely nothing to do with any industry or subject. It is a score of overall relative importance, the likelihood of a random surfer landing on the page. The search results do rank pages by their importance within a subject or industry.

I'm not whining about PR being displayed, it's how I make a lot of my living, and do a lot of my work. I still think it was a mistake to ever show it, but it wasn't my mistake to make obviously; I could never have created a search engine to properly rank even 100 sites. But I think it's difficult to measure such a dynamic thing as the web when your measuring instruments are too transparent.

"Too transparent" is obviously subjective, but in a continuum from "I have no idea how Google ranks things" to "Here are the equations Google uses and how they relate to your ranking", I think the web would be a better place if they leaned toward a little more mystery.

[davewray]

"Newbies who want it all now"...Good grief. Newbies have to start somewhere too. It's like the egg and chicken arguement. If you don't have PR, you can't garner link relationships to get it, but if you have it then life is easy sailing. This isn't about a "newbie" wanting it all now, it's about a "newbie" who wants a chance to become an "experienced and wise" webmaster someday....And in many cases, by performing different searches you'll see pages that come up higher in the SERP's than those with higher PR. Why do they rank higher if PR is the end-all to a relevant site? Google's PR is a tool and just that. Take it with a grain of salt. If I see a really relevant site and don't see any obvious spamming techniques I will link to it regardless of what PR it possesses...

[manilla]

atadams : "To track toolbar users' web browsing?"

You got it - exactly what I think.

[mil2k]

Showing PR
It was a mistake.

I would like to disagree with this statement. :)

[teeceo]

"Showing PR" That the only thing that shows up on my site. I mean I can see the when I type in the url and it has pr but, no slerp's at all. Its not in google searches but, it has PR? whats the deal?

teeceo.

[steveb]

"The search results do rank pages by their importance within a subject or industry."

They certainly do not. Frankly, it isn't even in the neighborhood of the ballpark. That is not what search results do, nor is what they are meant to do.

The toolbar display is just one little bit of the Google sauce we are allowed to see. I can only imagine the howling from some corners if the toolbar showed backlinks, or ranks for search terms, or a little duplicate penaltly bar, or a hidden text penalty notation, or a keyword density display, or a whois registration date, or a crosslinking numeric rating, or...

All aspects of the sauce can be manipulated, and it just so happens pagerank is one that is harder to manipulate than most (evidenced by the amount of complaints about it). Knowledge is power and I want as much data/knowledge as I can get, and I don't want to do laborious extra work to find it all out when I can just glance at a little green bar. What that bar represents will be there regardless, if you see it or not.

[Wired Suzanne]

Here is a terrible example again:

>> We will only include pages that are indexed by Google.
The page with the link to us should have at least a pagerank of 3.
The page with the link to use should have no more than 50 links to external websites.<<

[Jakpot]

Far to much is made of "page" rank