Tiger In the Tale
Quimby’s tiger was released from his soul over Paid Text Links Ads and Google’s policy on them. Or my post about it…whatever. Ah well…paid or unpaid links, Matt Cutts slobbering and Google worshipping aside, surely we can find something more approriate to release our soul’s energy over?
I dunno…where shall we start? Global Warming...Starvation in Africa...War in the Middle East. You name it. There’s a whole host of issues, that we as responsible, reasonable and educated people (hopefully) need to discuss and search our souls over. Or not. Maybe you are on an internal journey, seeking enlightenment. But splitting hairs over Search Engine policies towards paid text links is a tangent of an abstract issue, at best, and while it’s definitely worth discussing, it’s about as unspiritual as you can get. It doesn’t matter what, if any, your God (or faith) of choice is, but none of them would encourage you to link your soul (pun intended!) to such a trivial matter.
Of course, my tongue is firmly in cheek here! It is great that those who write and contribute on JOAB can openly disagree. What a boring world it would be if we all did agree. And Quimby made some good points: one that sticks to mind is that most of us who work in developing websites are often way too obsessed with Google’s power and the pagerank it gives to a website.
And ironically, since my post last week wondering whether Google was updating, Matt Cutts (more slobbering here, Quimby....) has, for the first time ever, recently posted a clarification on Google’s policy towards pagerank. To quote a couple of segments relevant to our own questions at JOAB-:
If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me.I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm.
I’m not sure if I’ve given the official word on a PageRank export before. It’s not a big event here at Google. Frankly, I didn’t even know we’d done our 3-4 month-ish push of this data. When I saw people talking about it online, I went to check and see whether it was a real push or not.
So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.
Quimby....let’s call this one even….
