Google Pagerank is Perplexing
Huh. Google. So. I spend some amount of time thinking about Google and Pagerank and what not, I am not by any stretch of the imagination an SEO expert, but I know some little tidbits about it. This very blog was created partially as a means of learning more about such things. I’ve experimented a little, learned a little and all in all feel reasonably satisfied.
Now, I know there’s all sorts of reasons why Pagerank is falling out of favour. It’s not overly accurate, doesn’t mean much, even if it was accurate it’s out of date, I know. But still, I am in the camp that believes it is at least a reflection of the truth that is the big G. If I can make a book analogy, Google is like Amber and Pagerank is a shadow (and if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about you should run to Amazon and purchase the collection immediately) - it may be twisted and mangled, but it is based on a kernel of Truth.
So here’s the thing. This here blog is an obsession of mine, I update it daily - 7 days a week. Lots of posts, some long some short, all sorts of SEO principals in play. It has some inbound links, some from really authoritative places and generally speaking has a lot of Google friendly content. It has a toolbar Pagerank of 5 - which I’m totally happy with. I aspire one day to reach 6. *shudder* But we’ll see.
I also maintain another blog - a moblog that I post to for kicks. I was getting too caught up in cameras and gear and wanted to step away from that arms race - so it started with my Treo and now rocks with the iPhone (seriously, the iPhone camera is no great shakes, but compared to my Treo it’s the cat’s meow, if the cat meowed awesome cameras). But there’s little obsession with the blog, I update it every now and again, if it gets one post a week it’s a good week. There’s maybe a sentence or two involved and that’s it. Dead simple. It’s got a Pagerank of 4.
What? It has essentially zero inbound links, barely any text to speak of, is irregularly updated and has only a small archive of posts. Three visits is a pretty freaking great day for the blog. How does that work out? I never really paid much attention to it, but thought I’d look and see - I figured it’d have a PR of 1, I hoped for a 2. But a 4? It makes my 5 seem cheap and unworthy.
I also took a gander at Google’s webmaster tools to see its crawling patterns and sure enough it comes every day. It doesn’t crawl a ton of stuff each day, but it’s there each and every day for the past 90. Here I thought that my obsessive posting habits kept Google coming back for more at this blog, but it turns out Google just comes anyway? What’s up with that?
So that’s it. I officially don’t understand and maybe all those folks are right and Pagerank really is meaningless. Even if it is based on some reality somewhere, it’s so far from it that it’s essentially random. You know? Or is there something else I’m missing?
