Page Rank obsession
For anyone who has been living in a cave for the last few years and is unaware, pagerank is the score out of 10 (strictly out of 11 since the scale runs 0 - 10) that google give each page in a website, and can be seen in the google toolbar as a little green bar. In principle at least it represents the importance of the page. More is good!
Every few months google republish the visible pageranks based on data from a few weeks earlier. Originally this ‘PR export’ happened more frequently - perhaps each month or so - then more recently every three months, and now it seems they are further extending the time between updates - it has been about three and a half months since the last full export (although some sites appear to have seen changes over the last couple of weeks there has not been a full export).
This pagerank export occupies a lot of people for a lot of the time - primarily:
- those who are new to website development and hope to see some visible progress in their sites as recognition of their work
- those seeking to do link-exchanges with other sites, a task made much easier when your own site has PageRank
- those who sell links on their sites, since the pagerank is a key factor in the price
- those making sites for clients, where the client sees the pagerank as a measure of the success of their new website
For me, the PR obsession lasted about 12 months, while I got my first few sites from PR0 to PR4-5. This wasn’t because I hoped to sell links, but because I was fed-up seeing everyone else talking about their PR5-6 sites and how easy it all was while I was struggling to get PR1 (Hint: once you have a few sites of your own with decent PR and / or you start paying for links it is much easier!)
Link exchanges, ideally three or four way, are now the main reason why I personally am interested in PageRank. Although reciprocal link exchanges are also frowned upon, in moderation they can be very effective at helping a website achieve improved positions in the search engine results.
For those selling links, it is a very lucrative business. A good PR4 link can sell for $10-15 per month, PR5 perhaps $15-30 per month, and PR6 $25-50 per month. PR7+ links can sell for very substantial amounts.
The problem is that google are trying to eliminate paid links from their calculations and no-one knows how successful they are going to be - so if I were to spend $200 per month on 10 PR5 links I would now have no idea if my site would become a PR6 or would remain unchanged because these links no longer had value.
And if I was planning to recoup my expenses by selling links on my new PR6 site I would be pretty keen for the PR export to happen - both so I could start earning, and to see whether all my effort and cash had been wasted.
It is frequently pointed out (correctly) that there is much more to a site than its Pagerank - position in the search engine results is determined by many other factors as well. But many of these factors are related to the quality and quantity of links into your site, and are all made easier if you have a high PR site yourself.
As a result, there is great interest in PR exports from many different interested parties, and not just among those who are selling links. Hence the obsession that continues to grip the webmaster community with the forthcoming (we hope!) toolbar PR export.
PageRank is both the end-of-term school report and the statement of possible earnings for the next three months. So it’s pretty hard not to be interested even if you aren’t selling links!