Web Site Ranking?

[cltwebs]

What's up with the Alexa Page Ranking? Google PR?

I've seen this posted on other forums before but it seems that the majority seems to think that these ranking are bogus.
Are they?
How are they determined any way?

Some people also think that the Google PR is over-rated too. That it's use has been blown out of proportion and should only be used for url popularity & content measures.

How then is one supose to measure their traffic compare to others?

The only reasonable measure I can think is how your keywords rank in various search engines.

What does everyone think?

[Emancipator]

Just on the topic of Page Rank my website has a page rank of 0 and I am in the top 10 on some nice terms on google. PageRank in MY opinion, take it for what it is worth is not what it is all cut out to be.

My rankings fluctuate but I put my effort into backlinks from other sites and put no time into watching the PR bar.

[trevHCS]

Originally Posted by cltwebs

I've seen this posted on other forums before but it seems that the majority seems to think that these ranking are bogus.
Are they? How are they determined any way?

Usually bogus means made up or faked but I can't really see how they can be faked as such as they aren't measured in the same way as anything else - eg: not like unique visitors figure could be bogus.

Alexa's rankings appear to give you an exact position within within the great scheme of web sites as to how popular yours is, however I think it's mostly done by measuring where people with the Alexa toolbar go so it's not that brilliantly accurate.


The Google toolbar PR is supposed to be based on Google's real PR as I understand it. The real PR is a figure giving your ranking within Google (ie: number of inbound links etc). and I think the toolbar PR is based on that.

Trouble is it's on something called a logarithmic scale so jumping from a PR 3 to 4 is much easier than a 4 to 5 and so forth. It is however supposed to be based on the entire Google database not just people with the toolbar although that might affect things, not sure.

Some people also think that the Google PR is over-rated too. That it's use has been blown out of proportion and should only be used for url popularity & content measures.

As has been said a few times - the Google toolbar PR is Google's greatest marketting and publicity tool.

You can't really use PR to work out the traffic a site is getting although it gives you a guide. For example our travel forums have no PR on most of the topic pages, but Google still brings us up very highly for topics which feature within the sites. Might be related to the forum front page having a PR 7 however.

I suspect the same applies to these forums and all over the web - use it as a guide, but nothing too accurate.

How then is one supose to measure their traffic compare to others?

If you use all the tools available such as Alexa rankings, Google Toolbar and Alexa's traffic graphs you can get an idea especially if they all seem to follow one-an-other, but theres no real hard and fast way to compare traffic as such without hacking the other persons server for their stats....not something I recommend I should stress! :wink:

The only reasonable measure I can think is how your keywords rank in various search engines.

Possibly the best advice I can think of is, don't worry too much about what the other guy is doing, just make sure your stats keep improving. Let him/her worry about what your stats are like and that way you'll get ahead in the longer term...

Trev

[popads]

Yea, don't worry too much, I never care a site with more traffic in alexa or a better PR ranking in Google.

The most important is how do you promote your site. If you promoted well and have a decent web site, visitors will come back to your page.

It is all about packaging and promotion, and don't worry about those numbers.