For more than 5 years, I’ve been an SEO consultant. Not a brand name, mind you, but I’m one of those people who get no satisfaction in life unless they know everything from the inside out. So, naturally, I had spent a tremendous amount of time researching all about keyword brainstorming and placement, vector analysis, theme-based Websites, link exchanging, meta tag optimization, etc.

So perhaps you could imagine how frustrating it was for me to see Webmasters gradually abandoning all this, and diving headlong into Google’s PR system. And like anyone who gets attached to something for so long, I initially got defensive and jumped at every opportunity to show how PR was the Devil!

But then, I went to study the PR system from a neutral perspective. As I considered the subject in its many aspects, I started to understand why people were taking to the PR phenomenon, even though most didn’t understand it themselves.

And so I decided to share my thoughts with you guys, so that we could study this from various points of view and hopefully come to a reasonable conclusion.

* * *

First of all, we should understand the mindset of the people operating Search Engines (SEs), like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search, etc. These people are in business, same as everybody else. And their business is to provide searchers with the most relevant, most comprehensive, and most suitable Websites pertaining to the search keywords used.

In the old days, SEs used to do that by examining the HTML code of all the Web pages they had in their databases and indices, and applying certain algorithms to decide the frequency and the importance of keywords in those pages, and then presenting searchers with the most relevant of those pages.

With time, SEs noticed that a lot of Webmasters employed scheming techniques to trick the SEs. Most notable among those techniques was the use of what was called Gateway Pages. A gateway page is simply a page that’s maximally optimized to score highly with the SEs for certain keywords, but doesn’t have proportionally decent content. The only goal of those pages is to lure visitors in, and then redirect them to another page, usually an irrelevant one.

Can you see why this was a problem for the SEs? Because it messed with their business of providing quality results to searchers.

So the SEs came up with another set of algorithms for ranking Websites. They started ranking them according to the overall focus of the whole Website, a method called Vector Analysis.

Simply put, when a searcher searched for “football”, the SE would rank a Website that was totally focused on football higher than a Website that has one page on football, another on basketball, another on ballet, and so on, even if the second Website was more optimized for SEs than the first Website.

Naturally, that was a major step in the right direction for both the SEs and the searchers. But unfortunately, this method wasn’t bullet-proof, since occasionally, a Website wasn’t dedicated to a specific subject and yet covered it much better than a Website that was dedicated to it.

I suppose it should’ve been obvious to me then that the PR system was the next logical step for the SEs. I’m not going to discuss the PR system in detail here, since this is a subject that deserves a separate discussion. Plus, most of you probably know a lot about it already .

Suffice it to say that the PR system is a measure of popularity of Websites. The more Websites link to Website X, and the higher the PRs of those linking Websites are, the higher the PR of Website X will be. In Google’s own words, 'the PR system is a voting system'.

So why is the PR system more accurate than the Vector Analysis system? Simple, really. Websites with high PRs are essentially very high-quality Websites. They wouldn’t risk giving a link to a low-quality Website, since this would dramatically hurt their reputation. And on the Internet, reputation is everything.

So indeed, I think that the PR system is a strong model for SE ranking. But an extremely important question forces itself now … 'Should we totally dispense with SEO in favor of PR?'

After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that the simple answer to this loaded question is Yes, within limits.

You see, let's say Website X is an excellent Website on books, with tons of excellent content. It has a lot of incoming links from various high-quality, high-PR Websites, and so has a high PR itself. But if someone searches for a specific book, say Story of Civilization by Will Durant, would that Website rank higher than a low-PR Website dedicated to that book? Absolutely not. Try it yourself .

So what’s the lesson we might learn from all this?

The PR system is an exceptionally efficient system, providing a Win-Win-Win situation. Searchers are guaranteed to get high-quality results. SEs are able to provide high-quality results. And Webmasters only have to focus on improving the quality of their Websites, and quality incoming links will follow subsequently and automatically.

But even though the PR system eliminated the need to spend too much time and effort on SEO, it didn’t obliterate it completely. Webmasters still should implement basic, old-style SEO, in order to guarantee that the PR system will work for them as well as it does for searchers.

* * *

I’m sure that, soon enough, Webmasters won’t have to know anything at all about SEO. A better system will rise to replace the PR system, with its own advantages and disadvantages. But for now, we have to make the best use of what we’ve got. And what we’ve got now is the PR system.


So … what’s your take on all of this?

I wonder why this post never generated any discussion! Is it really such a bad post?

Well, I am not quite sure of how that happens. I mean, say I do put in all the effort to create a quality content page, and then what happens. How would people know it is better than any other in the first place if it did not get visitors from the search engine?

I am not sure how the old style SEO took place, but I think one still would need to actively propagate his or her website in order to get noticed by people.

Else, how would the in-links follow 'subsequently and automatically'?

becoz it is a big beast that is hard for everyone to comprehend..

Quite a bit unrelated - but I cannot help not quoting few lines from Hotel California:

Anyway, yes, it is quite a beast, one that keeps morphing from one form to another - atleast the SEO is, and now it seems to be in the phase of PR.
I think though, it can be tamed - we just need to do a bit of study on it - a persistant study.

I've never been involved enough with this to have a preferance. While I have made many websites most are either for other people or simple personal sites that I really never tried to publicize. That having been said the "PR" method seems much more intuitive to me. The whole point of a search engine is to find the most relevant results and who is best to say whats relevant... the other people who use the internet. Seems like a good choice for where to go from SEO.

Also, just as a side note... you should never get too attached to anything in the technological world. It's known for how high paced and quick changing it is so becomming overly tied to any one aspect of technology is asking to have some seperation anxiety.

Well, currently I am not really happy by having all this PR stuff, because I used to be more popular on Google years ago, because I read a lot about SEO and did everything to get to the top on Google and some other search engines too, by top I mean on my websites subject.. but with time and the appearing of Page Rank a lot of what has changed, now I need links from other websites to be more popular, but to get links isn't as easy as it sounds, besides sometimes when you put links to some websites which Google does not like it is a problem, especially if you're using Google Adsense, you really have to be careful and not "cheat" but somehow, Google doesn't work as it used to, because I remember I was looking at the first links from my search results, but now I usually find what I need on the third link or even on the second page, because the first links are some kind of big websites , but not always.

I am not sure how I can get those inbound links either.

For people to actually put inbound links to my website, they must first visit it. Now, if the search results are already showing my website in some 'nth' page, how do I even get visitors. Now, I belive there should be considerable number of visitors for few of them to be webmasters who would bookmark the page and to put those links somewhere.

Hence, the big players will always remain on the top, and the small websites - even in the case where it has better and quality content, would remain in some obscure corner and it would never be discovered.

First, I have to apologize, because I now realize I skimmed over this part


When I said:

... I failed to mention that, even though we could - to a certain extent - stop worrying about seeking incoming links, we still have to work on publicizing our Websites. For example, I've always thought that listing my Websites in general directories (e.g. DMOZ) AND niche-specific directories is a MUST.


The point here is that we don't have to focus 85% of our time and effort on SEO, as we once did. But then again, SEO is not the only method of publicizing a Website, is it?



Cheers.

This post has been edited by tamer3kz: Sep 9 2006, 07:16 PM

The PR system is fine, but there needs to be alot more to come into play. metatags should (and I think are) also weighed down with Google.