Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

Page Rank, PageRank, PR, TBPR…no matter how you say it, it will not go away. Last week, and a week or two before that, we saw a big blow up in the blogosphere about Google manually reducing TBPR for sites who were selling links and then later blogs who were engaged in a lot of cross linking between their various blogs. The outrage was huge and in many cases the reasons for the outrage were legitimate. Sites should be able to sell advertising any way they want and Google has no right to tell webmasters how to run their sites. On the other hand Google can do whatever they want with their index and their “tools”. Obviously, the fact that Google is essentially the Internet to many people clouds the issue and getting a black mark (or little less of the green mark) can hurt sites in some people’s eyes. But why is that? Is it really Google’s fault that so many people consider the TBPR to be a sign of a sites authority? In a sense they share part of the blame because they put it out there and say that it is a sign of a sites popularity (even though they provide a disclaimer about its usefulness that most users don’t read). While I do believe that Google has some responsibility for the way TBPR is viewed IMO SEO’s share much of the blame.

Most SEO’s scoff at those who talk about TBPR as being an important metric. We all talk about how meaningless it is and when someone mentions it when discussing problems with their site we tell them it is not important. I believe this to be true. We all know that it is out of date and does not reflect the internal PR that Google uses as but one factor in their algorithm. The recent blow bares this out too considering that the big sites that were hit with a TBPR drop did not drop in the SERPs and continued to receive normal traffic levels from Google. So in effect this “penalty” seemed to be a show of force from Google with no real penalty behind it. But we still talked about it every where. Of course, many outside of our industry read these blogs and discussions and did not take away the point that TBPR is not that important. Nope, they saw all of the discussion and it reinforced their misunderstanding about the importance of TBPR.

Now we have a new PR update and many sites have lost a point or two and everyone is talking about it. Go to the Google Webmaster Groups and look at the number of PR related posts there. I am sure that you can go to almost any SEO or webmaster related forums and see the same thing. IMO most of these drops are not because a site lost any PR but that Google has in effect moved the goalposts (thanks Robbo) so now it takes more quality links to move the PR needle. Who knows for sure but from preliminary data the PR drop for most sites has not changed SERPs or traffic levels. Of course, SEO’s are now talking about the PR update leaving the less informed webmasters and the general public even more confused and clinging to the belief that TBPR is a useful metric. And the cycle continues. We will talk about it for a while and forget about it while telling everyone TBPR is not important…until it is time for the next update when we begin to speculate when the update will be and finally discuss the update ad nauseum.

I would be happy if Google actually got rid of the TBPR altogether but I don’t see that happening any time soon. People like it and as the latest blow up shows they are able to use it to get a message out to the search community without actually making an official statement. As long as they provide the tool we SEO’s should simply ignore it (not just say we ignore it) but actually ignore it and not talk about it. If someone asks about it we should explain why it is not important and move the discussion to aspects of SEO that are actually important. If we stop putting out conflicting information and stop talking about it the information will filter down to those who are not industry insiders and TBPR will be viewed as it should be. A neat little toy that provides information that really is not that reliable. Until that happens we will see this issue surface every few months before we go back to our normally scheduled business.

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