How much does Pagerank really affect SERPS?

[raysor]

Firstly I know that the toolbar Pagerank is not accurate or up to date, but setting that fact aside, how much does Pagerank affect search engine positions in say Google?

Last week someone on here argued that it had little effect, and coincidently, Shareworld has just lost its pagerank (its gone to zero) Im not sure if this was caused by us changing the site over to a new system (and changing all the page names - although I did redirect everything)

Or if it because some time ago we made the decision to remove all the "link exchange" links from our links page and use it properly - by only publishing links that we actually thought were relevent; as a result none of the people we link to neccesarily link back to us.

However, fingers crossed, this doesnt seem to have effected us in terms of search results (if anything our SERPS have increased along with our visitors).

However, Im quite worried now that we will be effected at some point.

Just looking for opinions really...

[webado]

It's because of the change of urls. Toolbar PR is attached to urls.

If you used 301 redirection all the value including backlinks and internal pagerank (the one you cannot know, but which actually affects SERPS since this is current) gets transferred to the new url. But the visible one will only happen at the next toolbar PR publication.

[raysor]

Ah right! that makes sense and explains why we havnt lost traffic.

Unfortunately one thing the toolbar pr did effect was my earnings per day on direct link ads

on theat note by the way, if I may make a little plug for myself?

http://www.direct-link-ads.com/aid1443/

Dont know if you or anyone has used this but Ive found it to be really good, they pay for having ads on your site and they pay per day per ad Ive found it to be really good (about 3 times my revenue from google ads).

If anyone is interested use the link above and I will make a small commission on new accounts!

[Sharron]

My toobar rank has gone down, as has statcounter's forum which is showing in the toolbar a PR7.

[webado]

If those ads are not robot-proofed and are regular html links and do not use rel="nofollow" in them (so they are capabale of passing PR) you are playing with fire.

Google will slap your site with a penalty for selling links for PR. It could your site delisted altogether.

[raysor]

yes they are regular links, I just checked.

Why would I get penalised, are you not allowed to have advertising on a site?

I was passed on this advertising site by a trusted source, he has been using them for a long time...

[webado]

You can advertise, but it has to be only so as to help with traffic, not PR passing.

So links for sites you adervtise have to be robot-proofed: using rel="nofollow" inhtml links, or oeping the link in javascript or going through a redirector page that's blocked n robots.txt. Whatever prevents robos from going there.

It's alwas been so, except Google didn't have all the tools to figure out what were genuine natural links (e.g. a link you post to a site which complements your own site, helps your visitors) and what were advertising, paid links.


Now Google's got it down pat and can detect unnatural linking schemes across the entire web and will not allow them to taint the concept of pagerank ( the internal one that Google keeps computing all the time, based on incoming links to a page, what influences SERPS).

Refer to Webmaster Guidelines.

[FrankV]

Supposedly you are allowed to have advertising on your site. You are not allowed to pass the page rank from your site to the advertiser's site. The rel="nofollow" prevents the passing of page rank.

To me, this says that Google wants everyone to advertise with them to get ranked. Just like I noticed that the Dmoz listing for Connect Commerce (formerly Performics) has already been updated to reflect the Google ownership while other pages that want to get into Dmoz have waited for a long time and are still not listed.

Money talks. The rest of us crawl.

[webado]

No, advertising with Google does not help with getting ranked at all. Your ad appears clearly marked as an ad, not part of organic results.

[FrankV]

And yet if I place a paid link on my site to another site and I don't mark it with the rel="nofollow", Google can, and probably will, note it and penalise me. On the other hand, I can advertise with Google and the sites that have my ad on them through Google are not penalized. That is what I'm saying. It's ok for Google to do it, but not for me to do it. Yes, I know that the javascript Google Ads do not pass PR. That is not the point. The point is that anyone can advertise with Google and the sites that the ad shows on receive no penalty, but if I place a paid ad on my site that is not Google Ads, Google can delist me unless I use rel=nofollow" on the link. It's all designed to allow Google to dictate what content can be on web sites and how.