The PR-rating, as most of you know, is relevant to how many links are pointing back at your site. It’s kind of a popular vote sort of thing. It is not entirely reliable though, as you can “vote yourself” as many times you want by creating back links – sometimes by hiring tons of people to post links on unrelated blogs on your behalf.

What I would like Google to do, is to offer an option to search without PR. I understand that in some cases PR is actually a good indicator on what quality websites we’re looking at, but on other instances… I would at least like the chance to search the web on the site’s own merits alone, take out the back link effect completely. As, there might be a site created yesterday that is far better than another site created 10 years ago which has tons of back links by the age only, but that actually offers more value to the visitor than the old site.

It would be a lot better if there was a way to compare your site’s popularity In Your Niche, but there isn’t, at the moment anyway. That is to say that your site’s influence where it counts has little to do with your page ranks. I must give my husband’s blog as an example. He writes a blog for people who use exergaming in professional health and fitness purposes. Professional exergamers, that is. (I bet you didn’t even know there were such thing as a professional exergamer!) His blog, Exergaming Australia has a modest page rank of 2 (oh, he’s gone up!) and his Alexa ranking is around 4,600,000. Not too impressive if you just look at the numbers. However, everyone who is anyone in the field of exergaming knows who he is and what he does and his influence in the field is world wide and instant. When you google “exergaming” his blog comes up as the second result, right after Wikipedia and Nintendo Wii doesn’t even make the first page! This is because his niche is so small, that even though EVERYONE of any importance knows him, the vast majority of the web is quite unaware of what a brilliant blog he runs.

On the other hand, I run a Barbie community site, as you know, with a page rank of 4 and Alexa ranking of about 476,000, which is pretty impressive for any site, BUT, I make no money (or very little) and the English speaking world is pretty much unaware that my site exists. Put “Barbie” on Google and you won’t see my site anywhere near the top of the results, I quit searching after page 6. And that is because there are a gazillion Barbie sites out there, collectors, articles written about the doll and so forth and so forth, and not even refining the search to “Barbie community” help me much. Yes, I am bad at SEO, but my husband there is even worse.

I checked a few Barbie-sites that I know of and who are very well known amongst collectors, to see how they rank. I kicked their butt so bad, I couldn’t find an unofficial Barbie-site (non-Mattel) that would have had better rankings than I have, not even my biggest direct competitor. How much good does the rankings do for me? Not much, other than I get to pat myself in the back for beating the other sites in the numbers game, but that’s it.

So what to do? Make sure you introduce yourself to all the right people and get the word out. Do the best you can do to produce high quality content and people who do find your site may spread the word where it counts. Focusing on your page ranks is not going to bring your fame and fortune they are there just to report to you how much you’ve improved, not where you should be.

Does that make sense to you?

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Nowadays, everything is “optimized” for Google. When I use it as a search engine, I no longer receive the most relevant pages, but the results of the best SEO-experts out there. It’s like the Olympics where the players use the best drugs that test can’t reveal yet. It SUCKS. It’s UNFAIR to everyone.

Google has again changed the rules on how they index pages, and what do they do? They announce to everyone that this and that no longer apply! Good heavens, Google! You have a big mouth and you need to learn when to shut up! Just tell people you have completely renewed your algorythms, and you are not going to reveal what they are. Sure they can still try to make their searches rank high, but you’ll have the advantage of being ahead of the game and serve relevant searches.

You will probably get webmasters turn away from Google and optimize for Bing instead, but the thing that made Google popular back in the day wasn’t webmasters, but people who found what they were actually looking for without some second class writer with first class SEO knowledge thought we should be looking for. I for one will be doing my searches elsewhere until you learn to shut the fuck up.

It was a good run while it lasted Google, but now I’m going back to Altavista. Who uses Altavista anymore?! I hear you ask. Exactly. When I did a few searches with keywords I often use and run websites for, my sites ranked as I would expect them to on Altavista, where as Google didn’t even blink. I know these sites are of high quality, but they are not obsessively search engine optimized and as such, Google didn’t take much of a notice of them. Altavista on the other hand ranked them fairly, where they were supposed to be as the last entry of the first page they were, and where they were supposed to be on the top, they were. I normally do SOME SEO, put in keywords and page descriptions – when I think I should – and put in links to my sites where I think it would be helpful for people but I’m not spending hours on end on link building and trying to improve my Google and Alexa rankings. So there you have it. Who would have thought.