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Webmasters Who Discount My Site Because of PR

Regardless of My Ranking & Traffic - I'm going to lose my mind

BuzzBomb

1:53 am on Mar 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I'm about ready to blow a gasket.

I have an authority site (or close to it) that receives over 50,000 different search engine strings per month resulting in 100's of thousands of searches.

If I was a webmaster, I would love to have a link off my site.

With that being said, things are "out of season" so to speak so I'm out looking to do link trades with similar themed sites and I'm CONSTANTLY running into webmasters who are hung up on freaking pr.

"Well, you're offering me a link off a pr2 page and my page is a pr 3 page. etc."

I totally understand where they're coming from but pr is not everything. Not even close. I'm tempted to say look dude, what do you rank for? NOTHING. What do I rank for? EVERYTHING. You don't think what I'm offering you is fair? My worst page gets more traffic in one day than your best page gets in a month.

I'd NEVER say that to another webmaster, but dear God, why the hell is everybody so hung up on pr? Heck, I'd take a link on a grey barred page with no pr if it was themed and had good content.

Does anybody else run into this issue? How do you deal these hard headed people who just don't seem to get it?

I'm not holier than thou. I don't think I'm better than anybody else. I dont have any ego associated with trading links.

I sure wish people would stop thinking 2006 and start thinking 2010.

onepointone

4:13 am on Mar 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Google really 'succeeded' in burning PR into the psyche of budding 'seo's' a few years back.

Seems anyplace selling sites, domains, links,... toolbar PR is the 1st thing mentioned.

Sometimes I think G keeps it around to just keep these guys offguard, or from having to think for themselves, or just think...

martinibuster

4:38 am on Mar 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Don't sweat it. People who are hung up on PR usually are the ones who know enough SEO to hurt themselves and others. Check their backlinks and I am confident many of them are going to have crap, including nofollowed blog comments. You're better off without them and should be happy they are self-selecting themselves out of your backlinks.

gn_wendy

8:02 am on Mar 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Does anybody else run into this issue? How do you deal these hard headed people who just don't seem to get it?

I deal with this each and every day... and it is starting to become somewhat of a health issue for me. High blood pressure, headaches, fits of rage - and all that jazz.

I guess all we can do is try and spread the word and inform our "peers" that there is a better way.

onepointone

8:23 am on Mar 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Why get upset? Seo has an element of competition to it. I don't mind if the competitors want to pursue a wild goose chase!

TheMadScientist

7:57 pm on Mar 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

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That doesn't get me as upset as when I'm talking to people who 'know SEO' about a site and the first question they ask me is: 'What's the PR?' or when I'm talking about selling and they say, 'But I can get a PR 5 site for blah' (I keep thinking PR's on a page by page basis, but that's not the point) and the one you have is only a 4 ... ' and I keep thinking, 'Cool... You can buy a parked adspam domain that's 5 years old, has had adspam on it the whole time and has a home page PR 5 instead of mine that hasn't ever had spam on it, has content, has a diversity of inbound links rather than the spam network sending it the PR which will disappear as soon as it's unlinked from the network, and, oh, BTW: mine has a website!, please, go ahead and buy the other one, and pleeeeeaaaaaassssseeee keep telling me how much you know about what you're doing when the best thing you can probably hope for is the domain is reset to 0 when it changes ownership and the adspam is removed...'

ChanandlerBong

9:34 pm on Mar 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

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...and then that person comes on here and starts a thread "PR5 site just been zapped to PR0!"

TheMadScientist

9:38 pm on Mar 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

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LMAO ... Exactly!

I think my 'standard response' to such threads in the future may be:
'Go Figure...' followed by a reference to this thread. LOL

docbird

2:21 am on Mar 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Well, it's also true that many of us might fantasise about a link from a PR9 or 10 pages...

Yet PR indeed needs taking with a pinch of salt. I set up a site that soon had PR4, for reasons beyond me, yet didn't dominate the SERPs (it's about a place that isn't so popular on sites), or soar to giddy PR heights. Made another lately, and w no inbound links it quickly had PR4 or so - an aberration, as quickly toolbar PR showed zilch.

It's indeed simplistic saying PR of linking page is all: maybe other threads have revealed more re ways google n co take into account authority status, relevancy (in ways far more subtle than just good or bad neighbourhoods).

Still, PR remains kind of entertaining. Best to try and laugh at the silliness, rather than let blood boil.

jmorgan

2:35 am on Mar 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

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You say your site is an authority site (not saying it isn't) but you're still out there chasing links? I would've thought authority sites do well attracting links naturally without having to trade for them.

But anyway, the reason PR is overrated at the moment is because it is pretty much the only stat that's measurable/quantifiable. I don't think you can put an exact measurement page relevance or quality content at the moment unfortunately.

TinkyWinky

9:46 am on Mar 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Yep - a massive problem with webmasters, agencies as well as clients who 'think' they are informed about what makes a site worth advertising on (for direct links or just brand awareness).

They just don't want to hear the fact that looking at PR is just one way to 'value' sites (and in IMO a small and outdated indication of relevancy and 'power') and they get blinkered in to believing that this is the most important thing (irrespective of IBLs, Traffic and other factors that are far more important to be used for judging whether or not to look at advertising, promotion or any other kind of partnership/purchase).

It is however good - that you can spot the 'tw4ts' very quickly.... ;)

PR is overrated at the moment is because it is pretty much the only stat that's measurable/quantifiable

Agree - but isn't it also about 6 months out of kilter with what a sites 'true' PR would be anyway - another thing webmasters/agencies/clients overlook.

wheel

1:36 pm on Mar 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

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I wouldn't completely discount PR.

First, in many cases - not all I understand, but many - it's a good indicator of how many links a site has. If the home page is a pr1 vs. a homepage that's a pr 7, the pr7 is almost certainly going to have a lot more links. And if those links are also high quality sites and relevent, then I think the pr7 is a darn good indicator that I want a link from that site.

Secondly, many SEO authorities discount PR - fair enough. But I know a number of very expert SEO folks who don't discount PR - they think it's still a pretty good part of the ranking algo - and if it's not directly, it's a reasonably representation in most cases of something else that IS a big part of the algo. So if you're going by the experts' opinion, I think the folks that know what they're talking about on this are divided.

What I do is look at the homepage PR to get an indication of the oomph of a site, then I don't sweat what page I'm getting a link from. Not overly scientific.

Edge

2:12 pm on Mar 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

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When I run into these folks I simply say:

Six years ago I had a PR7 on my home page and 350,000 monthly unique visitors.

Today I have a PR6 on my home page and 900,000+ monthly unique visitors.

Tends to shut them up..

visitors = people = potential revenue

internetheaven

3:19 pm on Mar 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Heck, I'd take a link on a grey barred page with no pr if it was themed and had good content.

I wouldn't. Whilst the actual number of the Pagerank is not so much a concern to me, at least having a number is.

Google is penalty-mad. It's quite scary the little things they dump a site for, even strong ones. To avoid their mine-field I'm stuck rejecting grey bar links.

Once Google stops their awful penalty based methods I can go back to basing my decisions on my own determination of quality instead of theirs.

Google really 'succeeded' in burning PR into the psyche of budding 'seo's' a few years back.

Google didn't 'succeed' in doing that. It wasn't their aim. It was misguided SEOs that perpetuated the problem made worse by dodgy webmasters who realised that faking PR was a good earner.

KaloVast

4:09 am on Apr 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

When I'm sort of casing a website to determine whether or not it has value, the first thing I look at is the Page Rank. Some tool bars display that as their icon, others have it as the first factor in their range. They do this because it's the single most recognizable, measurable form of rating a website. Notice I didn't say it's the only measurable form of rating a website? Yeah, because it's not. It's one factor.

Don't get all bent out of shape because some moron is turning down your website because that particular page has a less-than-satisfactory Page Rank. #*$! cares? I agree with MartiniBuster because those people who are turning your site down most likely are making loads of other mistakes that ultimately result in their website sucking.

My site has a page rank of 0, gets 15 visitors per day if i'm lucky but the bounce rate is about 3% and the average time on page is over five minutes. Quality over quantity? Haha

katherinez

6:39 pm on Apr 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I myself have a pr4 that gets very little traffic - whereas a friend of mine has a pr4 and gets HUGE traffic.

I am surprised there wasn't an update today - I kind of expected it.

wheel

2:08 pm on Apr 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

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I myself have a pr4 that gets very little traffic - whereas a friend of mine has a pr4 and gets HUGE traffic.

And therein lies one of the things where whether PR matters becomes a matter of opinion. Do you want the link for traffic? Or SEO purposes? If it's for traffic then PR gets blown out of the water (I've got pr4 sites that take little traffic). For me personally it's all SEO so I don't care how much traffic the site gets.

JS_Harris

5:55 am on Apr 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Don't sweat it. People who are hung up on PR usually are the ones who know enough SEO to hurt themselves and others.

Amen. If they knew any more they'd be building their internal link structures to get a PR8 on index by draining it from everywhere else just to feed their PR addiction. Make the offer but don't waste time convincing anyone who wishes to argue, it's not worth it.