Dave Walker

Yesterday, many of the big blogs woke up to find their PageRank lower by up to 3 points. And here I thought Pagerank became irrelevant two years ago…

Google PageRank is (theoretically) used by Google to weight pages in their search engine. The higher the PageRank, the better a page would do in the search engine. However, the PR system has been gamed and abused time after time, and Google’s Jaguar update in 2005 reset the criteria for PR, killing link farms and a lot of black hat SEO. When I wear my SEO hat, the last thing I look at is PR; it doesn’t tell me much. However, evidently many site sell advertising based on their PR. The Neilsen ratings system for TV has many of the same problems - see James Surowiecki’s analysis in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.

The remarkable thing about this PR shift is that (on one day’s data) these sites do not seem to be losing traffic.

Is PR, or even search engine marketing/optimization, even relevant in the social media sphere anymore? Yes and no, depending on the site. I’ve argued before that SEO is not dead, but there are better ways to get qualified traffic.

Many commerce sites still rely on the search engines for their traffic - the organic and paid listings are critical to their success. Strong organic optimization and good AdWords campaigns are the lifeblood of most businesses. But how relevant is this to bloggers, and are bloggers relying on the SEs for traffic? If they are, they’re hooped.

Referrals from other sites accounts for over 75% of my traffic. StumbleUpon is, by far, my biggest traffic generator, and Digg is a solid second place (I’ll talk about my traffic sources tomorrow). Admittedly, my numbers are not huge, but for a two-week-old blog and minimal marketing of the blog, I’m pretty happy. Social bookmark sites and referrals from other blogs have helped me far more than the search engines, and I’ll bet that other bloggers with strong SMO and SMM will say the same things.

Optimize for the search engines, keep the Google in mind, but don’t rely on them - there’s better ways to generate traffic.

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