PR observations

A lot of "experts" are advising not to pay attention to the Toolbar PR. They are correct.

However, the frustration should be addressed not at the webmasters obsessed about increasing their PR but at Google.

Why?

First, if they didn't provide a Toolbar PR in the first place, we wouldn't have this preoccupation with PR.

Second, disclosing PR actually started the link selling craze.

Google should either get rid of the Toolbar altogether or display an actual number. Displaying a meaningless number doesn't serve anyone.

That said, there are a lot of legitimate (in my opinion) questions about PR. For example, a gray bar or a PR of 0 can indicate the website is penalized by Google.

So, how can you tell if the Toolbar PR is truly 0 (or at least was sometime in the past) or the site is being penalized?

Again, I feel Google let the Ginnie out of the bottle and now don't know how to control it...

TBPR is an indicator of the amount of link juice/site strength of a page/site. Its just that its not a very good one. TBPR is quite easy to fake and gains its power from any link while SERPs rely on relivent links.

But it must be remembered that most websites donot try to manipulate their SERPs.

It also is true that page rank distribution with a site is an indicator on relative page strength within a site.

I think not to pay attention to the Toolbar PR is to extreme. I would say not to pay much attention to the Toolbar PR.

This is true. But I think we would may be net worse off

No this is incorrect. Link selling is driven by a desire to increase SERPs not PR. It is the way google algo works that drives the link market. If PR went link selling would increase not decrease.

One of the roles of TBPR is IMO an anti spam device and a means of discourging PR sales. TBPR has meant that selling links can result in a quite obvious penalty for selling links ie manual TBPR reduction. This discourages sites selling links. It also means spammy sites, poor directories etc can not easily sell links as no one will buy links from sites without TBPR. If there was no visable display I would guess we would see a quantum increase in link sales as any sites could start selling links.

It serves google very well. Another (and possibly the main) reason google displays TBPR is to get people to install the Google toolbar. This Toolbar gives google a wealth of market research data. This data helps keep google number one as google gets an enourmas sample of user behavior on the web. Its a gimmick that cheaply gets webusers to give google large amounts of useful information. It could be argued we all gain then because it helps make google a better SE.

Yes I agree. The information given the user by this poor metric is very missleading and confussing.

type your page adress into google ie www.mypage.com/page.htm if it comes up its in the index. if not it is not. (This is true wether the pages display TBPR or not and is always worth checking if doing link swap/purchase)

Google is completley in control it. Look at their recent increase in profits figures. It serves google purposes quite well....

gazzahk,

Thanks for the reply.

You said:

<< type your page adress into google ie ww.mypage.com/page.htm if it comes up its in the index. if not it is not. (This is true wether the pages display TBPR or not and is always worth checking if doing link swap/purchase) >>

but the page could be in the supplemental index and will show up, will it not?

Ed

It now hard to know exactly what the 'supp index' means. This index exists/existed as a result of technological inadequecy. Google has been merging its different indexes. The supp index is not what it once was. Google claims that it is constantly working towars all pages in its index being searched. Thus if the page shows its in the index the information is availabel to a search query.