Obsessed by Google PR ... why?
 

I am always puzzled about why people who trade links are so obsessed with Google PR. It is very easy to manipulate and has no power in terms of traffic and SERPs. Any thoughts why Google PR would be more important than Alexa ranking and incoming links?

I think because it is something you can see instantly in your toolbar. People love being graded and PR satisfies that need as well.

Relevance is where it's at.

I only care because Cleo won't list my PR0 Blogs.

I was more lucky with Cleo as I have a couple of PR1 blogs :-) People still believe the old myth about being punished for publishing links to PR0 sites, don't they?

That is wrong.

That is so taken out of context.

On regular submits I don't care about PR and don't look at PR. That was just a way to quickly filter blogs that I was taking on a no recip blog thread that I had started. In that thread I listed over 90% of the blogs posted.

I've noticed that just about any blog that has been active with a few months of hand written post is usually given a PR of 1 or once in awhile even more.

I was under the impression you didnt link to ANY PR0 blogs. Sorry Cleo.

I disabled my PR thingy and traded it in for Alexa's Sparky :)

When I open a site and it's like a couple mill... I'm like ok need to do some work on it.

Fuck PR

I'll keep my top 30 placements on Google for 12 keyword search terms |thumb

Her rule is a good way to filter out sploggers who want to toss up ten quick blogs, submit them, then abandon them. Regardless, the sort of "calling out" nature of your first post was unnecessary. Maybe not what you intended, but that's what it seemed like.

Ah ok - I guess that kind of answers my question then - thanks

I use SEO Quake, a Firefox plugin to gather information about a site. My configuration shows me a lot of relevant data when visiting a site. Instantly I do see Google PR, Alexa ranking, inbound links on Yahoo and Google, amount of indexed pages on Yahoo, Bing and Google, domain age, keyword density and so on. I can only recommend this nice plugin when looking at other sites in search for a trade:

http://www.seoquake.com/

Personally, I prefer to look at content of a site, inbound links and Alexa ranking, Google PR is just a secondary indicator for me.

It was like the opposite of calling anyone out. I mean, seriously, the only reason I cared about googles crooked PR scheme was because I thought Cleo used it. I think Cleo is pretty cool and would say nothing bad about her or too her.

And yes, I think its crooked because I can go over to the pond board and buy backlinks all day long for pages full of pictures of dogshit, 30 at a time and if I spend enough I can get PR4 for a page of nothing but pictures of dog turds.

Another vote for SEOQuake. Other great quick views are SEMRush Rank (based on any top 20 search results in google) and ext links.

PR means something.. I doubt google would spend money setting up and maintaning this whole system for nothing

I sell links on non adult sites, so for me PR is very important. :)

For new webmaster adult and mainstream, many of the best directories I have contacted wanted some Google pr ranking before they would accept your my link.

Since I don't have any past credibility in this industry, I feel pr could add some substance to my request to submit my galleries and link inclusion until folks get to recognize me as a viable webmaster/site owner.

I can see why people are so obsessed about PR but personally I don't pay all that much attention to it, there are much more important things to focus on when running a site

I used to really try to improve PR but i notice i have sites that do well in the SERP's that dont have a good PR. So i don't take it seriously anymore, i think maybe it used to be more important than it is today.

Bump for ya -

Why? |huh What point was there in bumping this thread?

Now that is has been bumped, PR is/was important because PR is what makes Google what
it is. It was by far the most important factor for Google. There was a lot of competition in search
with many companies spending tens of millions of dollars trying to gain market share. Then
Larry and Sergey, two broke Stanford students, had a brilliant idea that beat the hell out of
Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, and all of the other engines. That idea was that good web pages that
people will really want to see are the pages that people link to - PR. Google, then called
Backrub, beat the sophisticated text analysis of the other engines by returning results ordered
almost completely by PR. Google has since reduced the importance of PR somewhat, but it's
still important to the ordering of results ad therefore traffic.

Of course, the top PR site doesn't come up #1 for ALL searches - being relevant for the
search words it's also important. If the people who link to you are relevant for the search
terms, even better.

Yes, Nate could spend a ton of money and get a high PR for a page with pictures of dog turds,
and it would probably come up #1 in a search for dog turd pictures. That's most often the right
answer - if you spend $10 million dollars on a site devoted to dog turd pics that's likely a site
people searching for do turd pics will want to see. That's assuming he put some text on the
page and perhaps in the alt tags so the Google could tell it was a page of dog turd pics.

Without any text, Google wouldn't know they were dog turd pics, so the PR would be wasted.
So PR isn't everything, but it's still important.

Anybody wanting to twist their brain around Google SERPs should try reading this. |loony|
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3963005.htm

I see plenty of one page wordpress installs with nothing on the page and no inbound links rank high for keywords in title or domain name. Go figure.