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Admin Aaron  
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(2 users)  More options Feb 15 2007, 10:02 am
From: Admin Aaron
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:02:58 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 10:02 am
Subject: Is PageRank Finite?
I am wondering is PR is finite? Websites that do not do link building
and obtain backlinks in a natural organic way often have very few
incoming links which means lower pagerank.

I have a few blogs in the renewable energy area where I find, review
and write about companies, people and technology I believe will
encourage the growth of alternative energy.

I am generous and link out to others but sinse the site is new and
relatively unknown I am not yet getting many links to bring in more
pagerank. In other words I am giving more PR out than I am getting.

The question:

I recently started using the nofollow tag on external links with the
belief that pagerank is finite and I only have so much to share. Am I
shooting myself or those that I link to in the foot? Is this an
incorrect assessment of how to pass PR?

I believe this to be a highly relevant question and example of why
nofollow tag needs even further explanation.

Thank you if you feel comfortable with answering this Adam Lasnik or
others...

Aaron


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Sebastian  
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(2 users)  More options Feb 15 2007, 10:18 am
From: Sebastian
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:18:58 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 10:18 am
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
Aaron, you shoot yourself in both feet. PageRank hoarding is a sin. PR
is a sexy fay you should not pass, that's way to rough. Let her flood
your site, let her come and go as she decides, don't even think of her
when you deploy links. And please remove the f** nofollow values in
your rel attributes, that's unethical and counter productive.
Really :)
Here is more info:
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=155&page=100
Sebastian

On Feb 15, 4:02 pm, Admin Aaron wrote:


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Admin Aaron  
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(1 user)  More options Feb 15 2007, 10:47 am
From: Admin Aaron
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:47:45 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 10:47 am
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
So if I have a new blog with pretty much no PR is makes sense to link
out to all my friends? I don't know Sebastian, in an ideal search
engine world that would be great but I am not so sure pagerank in
infinite. I have also been thinking the way you do for a long time but
now I am not so sure man.

The way I have been using the nofollow is if I write about a grat
subject on another site but that site is filled with paid links I use
the nofollow because I do not want to pass PR to a bunch of spam sites
selling links BUT this recent idea is driving me nuts. ;-(

On Feb 15, 10:18 am, Sebastian wrote:


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Admin Aaron  
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(1 user)  More options Feb 15 2007, 10:51 am
From: Admin Aaron
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:51:47 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 10:51 am
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
Yo Google, please enable an edit feature for when we spell stuff wrong
we can go back and fix it. Just allow people to edit within a given
time period... like 5 minutes? Also how about a spell checker for us
dumb arses? Thanks! =P

On Feb 15, 10:47 am, Admin Aaron wrote:


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JLH  
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(1 user)  More options Feb 15 2007, 10:57 am
From: JLH
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:57:00 -0000
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
Aaron you bring up a good point.  A while back when some sort of
penalty was being dolled out Adam repeatedly said here and other
forums that one factor may be "Over Optimization."  To me a site that
has all external links nofollowed is ripe to be picked in an
algorithim for over optimizations because of the un-naturalness of
it.  It's a strong signal of two things 1) this guy doesn't trust
anyone he's linking to or 2) this guy is trying to hoard page rank.
Neither is a signal that should help a site rank for anything.

Back in the day search engines ranked based on the text only, keyword
counts etc.  People started repeating "free porn" 900 times on a page,
then they started looking at the META data people started stuffing
them, links were good so people started selling them, in all cases
google reacted and penalized the offending sites.  Nofollow was
introduced as a tool to help eliminate the value that blog comments,
message boards, forums, etc where having on the ranking of sites.  If
you're the site owner and didn't write the content you have a way of
saying I cannot vouch for what's there.  I would bet that if someone
tries to turn that around and use it to IMPROVE their page rank,
they'll get busted.  Just as using your keywords in sentences is good
but repeating them 100 times and abusing the H tags is bad.

Another thing to consider is from the inherent nature of the "web"
sites are not meant to be islands but rather connected to the whole
internet by both incoming and outgoing links.  A site is judged not
only by the content and anchor text of incoming links but the topical
nature of the sites linking in and the topical sites that you link
to.  If you have all nofollow links you are missing a key ingredient
to telling Google what the site is about.

I don't have any insider knowledge, but given enough time patterns
will emerge in the mass of data that they pour over every day, and I
wouldn't doubt a signal they will look at is your linking habbits and
the use/abuse of the nofollow tag.  PR hoarders will be penalized as
its a breakdown in the natural flow of the web.  It's like the wiki
debate, if they don't trust any of their resources then they shouldnt
be trusted as one themselves.  Of course they've got enough momentum
that their probably impervious to any sort of algo change, but smaller
sites are.

So where is the line between SEO and SEOO (search engine over-
optimization)?  I'm not sure, but as Adam also says, "does it pass the
smell test?"  And saying, "I changed all my links to nofollow so I
don't leak page rank" smells like you are trying to game the system
and artificially influence googles ranking, which in  my experience
they frown upon and react.

Personally, I always have nofollow links highlighted in my browser
with a bright red box.  If I stumble upon a site that has too many, I
move on, I wouldn't doubt google takes that stance sometime in the
future.  I just don't trust the nofollow actions yet, and I think its
going to get worse.  If you really want a bunch of sites that you link
to be not followed for ranking purposes (affiliate links, selling
links for traffic only, etc) I'd put those on a redirection hidden
behind the robots.txt.  That way Google isn't going to follow them at
all because they aren't going to see them, and they are not going to
be able to hold it against you because there is no possible good that
can come from a page that is not crawlable.  As far as a site with no
eternal links, I'd say that's just as shady as disabling the back
button, the site is no longer a part of the web, but only a town where
all the streets going to it are one way, and after a while people will
notice that no one returns from that town, and no one will go there
anymore.

Now I doubt Adam will/can come on here and say that they penalize or
don't penalize or give credit for the use of nofollow as commenting on
the actual ranking is probably not allowed in the least bit, but these
are my two cents :)

On Feb 15, 9:18 am, Sebastian wrote:


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Sebastian  
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(2 users)  More options Feb 15 2007, 11:53 am
From: Sebastian
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:53:27 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 11:53 am
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
In the case of linking to a site plastered with affiliate links and
ads, where is the point to write about them in the first place, if you
don't like them? Well, given that this site has a page hosting
valuable information, wouldn't it be the search engine's job to allow
or disallow incoming PageRank at this site? Why should you pre-qualify
links for Google's ranking algo? This attitude smells like self-
censorship based on fear, and you shouldn't fear Google when you link
out.

Applying nofollow crap to affiliate links is a completely other story.
I have no problem with Google's position that affiliate links should
not carry Googlejuice, but just the human traffic. I say "nofollow
crap" because rel=nofollow is IMHO not the suitable instrument to
achieve this particular effect, or call it favour to the engines. I
use rel=nofollow with affiliate links to save my own ass, although
it's Google's job to decide whether a particuilar link should carry
weight or not, and although I do think that rel=nofollow is not the
right thing to use in this case.

All this thoughts and countless confused discussions are results of
the somewhat hapless implementation of this crawler directive, and
it's ongoing semantic morphing. Sure, rel=nofollow is a generic
mechanism to do a ton of things which all make sense. But it's a geeky
tool for search geeks, not a suitable tool for webmasters, editors, or
publishers.

Ok, back to PageRank. Think of PR as a statistical approach to emulate
Joe A. Surfer's behaviour, where the middel initial stands for
Average. PR just tries to follow Joe's footsteps on the Web, sometimes
guessing whether Joe will click link A or B, thus deducting both
possible click-paths' scores equally. PR is a model of the Web, kinda
road map from any point to any point, weighting each and every path/
lane's quality by scoring the destination. And because it's just a
model, it's weight as ranking factor is not that important as the
toolbar suggests. The PR hysteria reminds me of the Beatles BTW. Sure
PR is great, it's sexy and all that, but it doesn't show the (whole)
big picture one has to think of when it comes to optimizing contents.
Hence optimize for visitors, remember the visitors pull out the
plastic, not the bots, create broad and easy to walk paths through
your contents all leading to your signup forms. PR will follow the
visitors to honor your efforts not only with green pixels. IOW since
todays PR is Google's secret sauce, and there are other important link
cargos, it just makes not much sense to speculate about PR
distribution. PR is addicting and distracting, hence you should ignore
it to get your job done.

Sebastian
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/

On Feb 15, 4:57 pm, JLH wrote:


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Admin Aaron  
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(2 users)  More options Feb 15 2007, 12:29 pm
From: Admin Aaron
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 09:29:53 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 12:29 pm
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
I agree with a lot of what you guys say but let me ask a few more
questions:

JLH - If Google punishes sites that hord PR why does Wikipedia
(educational), Amazon (affiliate) and other eCommerce sites doing so
well in search engines?

If you look at http://solar.rain-barrel.net and any other of my sites
you will see that I am doing nothing to game search engines at all but
also notice the PR, how much do I have to share? >> Is PR finite? <<

Sebastian - You said" "In the case of linking to a site plastered with
affiliate links and
ads, where is the point to write about them in the first place, if you
don't like them?"

Say I find a farmer/inventor who doesn't have a website but his new
wind turbine was written about on a local news site that is littered
with paid links and it's "SEO" is linking out with hidden text to
viagra spam. I want to write about this man who is offering something
unique but the only reference I can find is on this local spammy news
site. Wouldn't this be a case when the nofollow tag should be used?

Here is another one: Say I write about a cool company that is looking
to market complete solar arrays but when I review the company I find
that they have multiple sites and I just do not have time to analyse
their intent, wouldn't it be safer to use a nofollow here?

I do not spam or use the nofollow to spam BUT if I understand it
correctly what it does is break the connection between you and the
possible bad neighborhoods that can have indirect negative impact on a
websites "trust" or whatever you want to call it.

One more thought: Did you guys ever think that our debates actually
build better algorithms? Are there people in white coats with clip
boards taking notes? You guys got all kind of interesting ideas,
that's fo' sho', thanks! :)

On Feb 15, 11:53 am, Sebastian wrote:

...

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Sebastian  
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(1 user)  More options Feb 15 2007, 1:35 pm
From: Sebastian
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:35:16 -0800
Local: Thurs, Feb 15 2007 1:35 pm
Subject: Re: Is PageRank Finite?
If you link to linkworthy content you should not use rel=nofollow. If
Google doesn't think the linked site is worth indexing, that's fine,
but it's not your problem. You've done your job by providing your
visitors with external content you honestly think is interesting for
the crowd. Trying to guess what Google could think with the intention
to castrate a link when Google might dislike the target sounds just
not right, and it makes no sense, and Google doesn't encourage you to
handle rel=nofollow this way. This goes for both of your examples.

Also, not every site carring tons of ads is a bad neighborhood, think
of high ranked sites like SEW for example.

Would you link to my articles (I know you did it already)? Oups, I
should have told you that Google (AdSense) pays my hosting fees ...
sounds weird, eh?

Sebastian

On Feb 15, 6:29 pm, Admin Aaron wrote: