Foreign Perspectives

Something that’s very typical of any technology is that those producing it use some of the terms to describe it in a way that it completely at odds with the understanding of the users of that technology.

Perhaps the highest profile example around at the moment of this divergence in understanding is “pagerank” or PR. You’ll likely have seen that as a little green bar if you have the google toolbar loaded.

For google, it is a measure of the authority that they assign to each webpage on the Internet and runs from PR1 to PR10. If it’a a very new site or one that google have “issues” with then it’ll have PR0. So, a PR4 site has more authority than a PR3 site. The problem is that google measure this authority by reference to the number of sites which link to each page. Thus a PR4 page will have more links to it than a PR3 site.

However, a considerable number of people have confused the issue of “authority” with that of traffic coming to the page. So, they, by and large, assume that a PR4 page will have more traffic than a PR3 page. In fact, that’s far from always the case since at a very simplistic level you could have a PR10 site exclusively writing about, say, dust on tables and it would be the site with the most authority about dust on tables. It might get virtually no traffic though. Whereas, you could have a travel booking site with loads of traffic but relatively few links.

This difference in understanding has meant that advertisers have been willing to pay more to have things written about them on sites with high pagerank than they offer for low pagerank sites. For example, a typical article might get $10 on a PR2 site but you’d get $50 for the same article on a PR5 site. Yet, as noted, that PR2 site might well have a lot more traffic than the PR4 one does.

But google don’t want their pagerank algorithm being manipulated by those companies that buy articles and links so what they’ve done is to artificially drop the pagerank for many (but not all) of those sites which get paid to write articles. So, for instance, we see JohnChow.com now sitting on PR4 when previously he was, quite rightly, on PR6. Somehow it does seem something of a nonsense to have his site sitting on the same pagerank as mine when he quite clearly has a considerably greater amount of traffic on his site than I do and the links to go with that too.

Google people actually refer you as having broken the Terms of Service of google by taking payment for writing posts. The problem with that is that very, very few people (if any) actually have a contract with google. In fact those Terms of Service refer to the use of specific tools on google and I fail to see how a totally separate website could breach Terms of Service when it wasn’t using those tools at the time. Strangely though, the google people can’t see the problem in that stance.

I think this is something that will run for a while yet!