Since spam bots can’t read, this post is pretty much pointless, but give me any excuse to underline the fact I’ve on the web for over ten years now, and there’s no stopping me.
In the old days, and I am referring to the days of the dot com boom, requests for link exchanges were usually composed by a human, and also included an actual and tangible incentive to consider such a request.
Things like:
My homepage receives 10,000 unique visitors a day.
or
Three thousand web and graphic designers visit this site each week.
Now it seems some arbitrary metric, called a Pagerank, is all that matters.
Earlier this year, yes, I say it again, after being on the web a mere ten years, I (finally) heard for the first time about the Google pagerank. Yep, ok, call me ignorant, sitting in my little corner of the web pontificating and procrastinating as I do, but man was ignorance bliss.
It turned that for (possibly?) years people had been getting themselves in a flap over a little algorithm that some search engine uses. What, does it have some sort of monetary value or something that I know nothing about?
Pagerank is well and good, but does it generate any traffic, because that’s all I am interested in, or does, as I suspect is probably more the case, traffic generate pagerank?
But back to those automated link exchange requests. One arrived yesterday proclaiming I was in the running for a link from a Pagerank 4 page should I agree to the link exchange. W00t and lovely, but what sort of traffic does that page see? 10,000 hits an hour?
If the spam bot that sent the “request” can read this, do get back to me, I may just be interested…
I’m a PR4 and I’ll swap links with you, no questions asked. That means don’t ask about my traffic ;)
I thought we agreed never to discuss PR! ;)
Hey
Been subscribed to this blog for a few weeks, thought I would leave a comment on this post.
Pagerank does have monetary value. You can sell links for higher amounts through places like Text-Link-Ads and TNX. It also helps for selling private advertisements.
There’s also the benefit from getting better results in the search engines and hence, more traffic. Notice that websites like The Age or News.com.au with super-high PR rank very well on search engines for on so many of their articles.
I dropped to a 2 for selling links, presumably, and it hasn’t hurt my rankings. So overall I have stopped worrying too much about it. But it can be a useful tool overall.
The basic reason that someone will tell you their PR when angling for a link exchange is it is much more credible than saying “I get 4,000 visitors a day”. Page Rank is much harder to fake than traffic.
Hi Jonk, thanks for your comment and visit. You do have to take some of the posts around here with a pinch of salt sometimes, disassociated is more social than MMO after all. :)
Having said that I really do think the whole PR carry-on is a load of cobblers, and way too many people over obsess about it.
Another site of mine which had been online five minutes and had about five incoming links ended up with a PR5 in the April 07 update. It didn’t even deserve a PR1 IMO ;)
And if someone lies about the level of traffic they get to score a link exchange here, the link would get deleted in pretty short order!
Hey
Cool, I read your post and as a new reader… couldn’t decide how much salt was involved… hehe
Interesting story re: your PR5
I was doing this ten years ago, before there was Google (at least in the mainstream) and long before PR, so I try not get too wrapped up in the hysteria… there are other ways to make a name for yourself online :)