Quick Quiz - Which one of the two forms of website ranking are useless indicators of your website?
A. Alexa Rank
B. PageRank
For the answer, click and drag from one arrow to the other
> Answer - C (alright so it was a trick question, they both are useless at ranking a website) <
Now it’s time to explain why…..
Alexa ranks each sites traffic based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.
In English it means, your Alexa rank will only improve if visitors come to your website with an Alexa toolbar active. If you ave 5k visitors and none of them have an Alexa toolbar active, well you end up getting no rank. So as a result, a low Alexa rank is nothing to worry about, or even bother trying to improve. On the flip side, a high Alexa rank is nothing brag about, in fact it just means you have a lot of friends who, for some reason, think it’s important to have.
PageRank - Ahh the topic of multiple discussions and numerous heated debates. I know when I write this, I am going to have people coming out of the woodwork trying to prove that what I say is wrong. But here goes anyways……
PageRank is simply an effect, not a cause. No one understands it or even has a clue how to get it, they all believe it’s about backlinks from other relevant websites that will "Bleed" off page rank through these links, or it has something to do with traffic, or age of a website.
The truth is, I have seen multiple websites with PageRanks of 5 with no backlinks from other websites, just internal linking, usually from web pages within the website that have no PageRank.
A recent good example that I can point out is a website that I have been working on, Aspenmlssearch. This link takes you to the Advanced search part of the webpage, and yet it has a PR of 5, and it only has internal links. It has no backlinks from outside websites, and no PageRank sharing from other pages, because all of the other pages on the website have no PageRank.
Another Example
One of my friends websites which has been around for 12+ years, Ultimatetaxi.com, I have noticed on his pictures page, that the PageRank will not "Bleed" over to duplicate link titles on the page. Even though the pages that the links go to are different, but by the mere fact they have the same name for the link, the PageRank will not go over to the webpages. Only one of the duplicate link with the same hyperlink title will receive PR. Here’s a link to the picture page, and yes it is an old website, but it has been around for so long with minimal changes, that you can see the flow of PageRank among the pages.
Now for the real argument to start….This is a theory I have been working on and testing. Feel free to try it and tell me the results you get.
From what I have noticed, on ultimatetaxi website, is that meta tags(Title, keyword, & Description) do matter in terms of PageRank sharing. The last update of PageRank on his page was 8/11/2007, so if you scroll down to that date on the picture page, you will notice the link has PageRank. But what you will notice if you go through the links, that only Hyperlinks with Title text that matches a keyword from the meta tags will get PageRank sharing, and the ones that do not match any of the meta tags, have no PageRank. You will see a couple pages, maybe 4 that have taken on a life of their own and have developed PageRank, but these pages have a much lower PageRank then the ones that had keywords in the hyperlink Title.
So now, it would make a person wonder what would happen when you are doing links back to your website, if you put in keywords from the website you are linking from in the title of the hyperlink. Note: I am not referring to Alt Text, I am referring to what goes between <a href=http://yourwebsite.com>and</a>, or for the Board url code [url=http://yourwebsite.com]Text Here[/url]
In conclusion, all I can say is that PageRank is no indicator of your website or more importantly your traffic, in the case of Aspenmlssearch, the website only has 20 to 30 visitors a day and yet has a PR of 5. PageRank is not a result of massive Backlinks, it can be achieved by sufficient internal linking with in the website.
PageRank has nothing to do with Search Ranking, and I do not need to go into detail on why it is useless for getting number 1 on page 1 of Google search. (Ducks, and waits for the mob to come)
If anyone wants to leave a comment, with their opinions or ideas, I would be more than happy to change my current view on these types of ranking.
PS. It is not beneath me to build my websites PageRank, because it is true that advertisers pay more if your PageRank is high, mainly because they know no difference and believe it is an important ranking factor of the website.
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2 Comments
nice works
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