Is PageRank Dead?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 28 of October , 2007 at 7:30 am

Google had a PageRank update this week. Most of us have been sitting with anticipation for months looking for it. It finally happened.

Well, I’ve got to say that I fared pretty well across the board. Almost all of my websites went up in PageRank. Some other people, however, didn’t fare so well. John Chow comes to mind:

Well you know what? PageRank is caught in the 90’s, and that’s why I’m going to go out on a limb and claim PageRank… stuff it… BackRub, to be dead. Dead as a Dodo. Dead as an Alexa rating. Dead!

Why John Chow Is Angry About PageRank
Is this just an angry rant or does John Chow have a point? Is PageRank dead?

I say it’s the proverbial Yes and No. Yes, it’s dead, but not in the sense that John Chow thinks.

PageRank has always been a measure of a website trust. It was invented back in the day when not many people were selling links, but then there weren’t that many websites on the Web either. So what do you do when, as John Chow says, most of the websites online are in business to make money and not just provide free information? Do you penalize them for making money from their links?

Should We Trust PageRank?
I partly see Google’s point. If I buy a link from Website XYZ in order to affect my PageRank then I, in essence, am buying, or attempting to influence, trust with monetary units. Isn’t that a lot like buying votes in a political election? Guyshttp://www.johnchow.com/the-pagerank-ripple-pagerank-is-dead/ like John Chow argue that because we’re in business to make money then we should be allowed to do as we please and charge for links, pay for links, buy links, and influence trust with money. I’m not so sure he’s right.

You see, at the end of it all is trust. And if everyone were buying and selling links then at the end of the day I wouldn’t know who to trust. How would I know whether that PageRank 8 website achieved its PR due to buying links or due to actually earning trust - the hard way? As a consumer, I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t know. And this is where Google comes in as the cosmic police force. Their job is to help searchers find the information they are looking for and if that means penalizing websites that engage in behavior meant to deceive searchers into believing they are trustworthy then that’s the way the game is played.

PageRank: The Only System We’ve Got
Of course, one could argue, as some people do, that PageRank is dead in quite another sense. That is, it cannot be trusted to be a good and fair judge.

I admit, there’s no perfectly fair system. Someone is always going to take it on the chin. The only question is who, and that person will undoubtedly always shout “Unfair!” But thinking it’s so doesn’t make it so. Someone has to judge the good and the bad and who better qualified to do that than the company that created the playing field in the first place? Agree or disagree, but it’s the only system we’ve got and so far it’s done a pretty decent job.

Category: PageRank

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