The Need for a New Gauge: Moving Beyond Visual or “Toolbar” PR Rankings - Why is PR used as a gauge?

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So why do webmasters insist on using this gauge in order to determine the worthiness of a link exchange or text link ad? I honestly have no idea, but I’ll give it a shot anyway:

1. Familiarity - One of the first things that newcomers to the SEO discipline learn about is Pagerank. They install the Google toolbar, activate the little green bar, and off they go to evaluate websites. Next thing you know they’re complaining in some SEO forum about how Google is irresponsible for not updating the green bar more often.
   
   
2. Laziness - It’s much easier to refer to a Web page’s PR ranking instead of taking the time to evaluate factors such as backlink data (in Yahoo or MSN), outbound links, link location, SERPs of the page in question, and other important factors. People are always looking for shortcuts, and the little green PR bar provides the ultimate shortcut in terms of evaluating a web page’s SERPs value.
   
   
3. Ignorance – Many webmasters simply do not know that, among other things, visual PR has absolutely no bearing on SERPs (Google calculates “internal” PR data for all indexed Web pages, but does not share this data with the public) and does not factor “relevance” at all.
   
   
4. No alternative - There are no alternative “third party” tools that properly gauge the SERPs value of a specific Web page. Until someone (or preferably several different entities) develop a ranking tool that supercedes PR in terms of evaluating SERPs value, webmasters will continue to rely on the good old green bar.
   
   Note: There have been some faint rumblings that Google is actually in the process of refining visual PR in order to make it more “useful,” but I’m not holding my breath.

Next: There are other ways to evaluate Web pages >>
 

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