The Relevance of Google Page Rank and Malaysian Advertisers

I HAVE long thought that Google Page Rank is important to the success of a site, and if you are ranked between 5 and 7, your site is indeed important and if you are anywhere lower than that, you are not so important in a world where Google rules. And this concern was amplified some time last year when this site was zeroed by Google, as did some other pretty popular sites.

Although there are a number of the sites which are hardly worth the time spent on, simply for their senseless regurgitation and repeating of content from the bellies of other sites, they have been given some respectable pageranking for some strange reasons.

So, I have decided deep-plumbing Google about the importance of its Page Rank so that I can gain insight into the heart of the problem. And this effort has turned up some pretty interesting things about Google Page Ranks and how people out there could have been misled by its misplaced importance. I will share with you some of my findings here.

One of the earliest papers arguing the accurancy of the Page Rank is that of Google Watch which posted an article by Daniel Brandt (founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc). While search engine optimisers argue whether or not they should use PR as a yardstick to measure their site's success, lesser mortals like you and me should read what Google Watch has to say about Page Ranking in its article: PageRank: Google's Original Sin .

The most recent update was on June 26 2004, four years ago, which capped the conclusion on Page Rank (and I quote):

The consensus among observers is that PageRank is not nearly as important as it was up until mid-2003. Many sites with good PageRank are not doing well in Google, and many with poor PageRank are ranking well for keywords that are important to them. These days, the keywords in the anchor text of external links are more important than the mere fact of the link itself. (In its classic form, PageRank was computed from links without any consideration of content.) Finally, the Google toolbar indication of PageRank -- which has always been too crude to be of much use -- is no longer even reliable.

It has always been the case that large sites with average or below-average PageRank have a difficult time getting all of their pages indexed in Google. This is one area where PageRank may still play a role. But for the most part, this essay is out of date. It remains posted here for historical reasons.

I remember getting quite alarmed about the Google Page Rank of a certain site dropped and how I failed to get a response from the people at Google Singapore. No one wanted to say anything and the public relations people representing them gave a promise that was never delivered. In the end, I was no smarter than I was in the beginning when I wanted to find out what the basis for the Page Rank system was.

My query then was to have an understanding of how a site can be made better to conform to Google's crawling needs and ease of search for users looking for related materials, and if Google Page Rank played a part in this, I would like to know why. But with the futility of my effort, I turned to Google itself and sure enough, there were more answers than I could possibly digest - and enough for me to make a layman's conclusion over PR.

I am now questioning the relevance of the Google Page Rank after having read so much about how it could be flawed - and I also wonder if the Page Rank button on my Google Toolbar serves more than a decorative purpose.

If you wish to plough through the many papers that I have found, please do so here:

• Google PageRank: Biased and fundamentally flawed?
• How PageRank Works & Why the Original PR Formula May be Flawed
• The Weight of Google PageRank in Ranking (one of the earliest on PR)

and a whole lot more here

Footnote:
Having said that, how do Malaysian companies that want to make their online adspend more worthwhile pick the best sites to advertise in?

Well, I think the best is still to get a site traffic report and if possible, keyword searches. If you are targetting a generic crowd, go for the highest I suppose. And if you are looking for more focussed hits, keyword search reports will do just fine. Apart from that, if you still want to amuse yourself, use PR to guide you.