Webmaster Tools Drops Page Rank

Posted by Grizzly on Oct 15th, 2009 | 112 comments

I have said this for a long time now (a couple of years actually) but PR or page rank is pretty inconsequential when it comes to your site’s ranking for search terms. The vast majority of bloggers and Internet marketers have continued to obsess over their PR however, believing that a high PR will somehow foster better rankings for their sites and pages. Not so and at one point my PR zero site ranked number 1 for one of the most competitive terms online. This did little to convince some of my readers that what I was telling them was true, rather they chose to believe that it must have been a glitch in the system or I had pulled some kind of sneaky “fast one”.

Well, for those of you who use webmaster tools you will now notice that Google has removed the Page Rank data from the Crawl Stats .

These stats used to show under "Crawl Stats" in Webmaster Tools

The Reason?

Susan Moskwa, a Google employee stated the following in Webmaster Central in reply to someone questioning the missing data;

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

This doesn’t mean that PR no longer exists – it does – it just means that G is trying to get webmasters to quit focusing on its relevance. (and quit trying to game the system in order to inflate their PR perhaps) The irony is that they haven’t removed it from the toolbar though. Strange given the reasoning – far more people use and see the toolbar than use webmaster tools. It should be removed from the toolbar too – but G won’t. The toolbar is their Brand and the home office knows that removing the PR from the toolbar will lead people to remove the toolbar which is removing Google from a lot of browsers…

Just thought you might like to reconsider your reliance on Page Rank – it really is a minor factor in serp rankings.

Cheers

Griz

Google’s Interest Based Advertising

Posted by Grizzly on Apr 7th, 2009 | 109 comments

Today is the final day for Adsense publishers to update their Privacy Policy in response to Google’s new initiative called Interest Based Advertising. I had mentioned that I don’t recommend opting out of using Interest Based ads and a few readers seemed concerned about this. I thought a short post to clarify my thinking was in order.

(note – this site is not associated with Google.com or Google Adsense and you are encouraged to visit Google directly for more information.)

The idea behind Interest Based Ads is to increase CTR and conversions in regards to Adsense. The current Adsense model is based on Targeted Placement ads and while it has helped Google keep their Advertisers happy in the sense that they save money by not paying for poorly converting clicks (smart pricing) it has not had the effect of increasing Google’s revenue or in increasing the advertisiers overall sales. Ultimately Google needs to increase revenue without loosing advertisers in the process. Moreover Google wants to increase it’s advertising inventory and the best way to achieve this is by getting advertisers to buy more advertising. To do this they will have to provide better ROI to the advertisers.

Hence… Interest Based Ads. The premise being that a large portion of adsense page views are shown daily to untargeted visitors who may be reading any given site for any number of reasons but not necessarily because of any particular interest in the subject matter. Think of people who follow links from one article to another and end up on a site that has little to do thematically with the site they began their journey on. In most cases these visitors are never going to click on an ad and for the few that do they are unlikely to lead to a conversion for the advertiser. The question is – what if such users were presented with ads relevant to their search history rather than ads relevant to the current page they are browsing? Could Google entice more clicks and could this lead to higher conversions for the Advertisers? We will find out…

As for Publishers this should not be viewed negatively as there is a potential upside and escpecially for those publishers who don’t drive primarily targeted traffic to their sites. Given the fact that Google will decide whether to show targeted ads or Interest based ads to any particular visitor means this should reduce the likelyhood of a publisher being smart priced as G can’t hold the publisher accountable for poor performance of Interest Based clicks. (or it shouldn’t as the performance or lack thereof is not in the publishers hands)

To put it simply Google is trying to increase CTR where it feels it can and is not likely to penalize Publishers for poorly converting ads that Google displays on their sites beyond the publisher’s control. The real upside is that publishers may see a nice increase in CTR and earn more revenue even from low paying CPC ads without being smart priced in the process.

Whether this pans out or not I recommend everyone at least take part and test it before opting out. There is nothing to be gained by not giving it a shot. It may not work for some and one can always opt out later.

For those of you driving mostly social traffic this is what you have been waiting for – Google like everyone else is trying to convert social traffic. It is a huge market and so far has proven hard to monetize. Will Interest based ads work? Who knows but if it does publishers will see much better returns from their Adsense accounts. If it doesn’t then publishers are no worse off than they are now. And that is why I recommend everyone give this a trial period in order to evaluate the results. If your earnings tank – opt out but at least find out first.

Cheers

Griz