Comments on: Pagerank Should NOT be Gotten Rid Of

By: SarahG

SarahG — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:33:38 +0000

The downside with Compete is that it only seems to use US visitors so anyone with a country specific domain name won’t necessarily get much ‘help’ from Compete. A few sites I tried are not coming up with accurate stats as they are UK domains.

I agree, you need a good balance of metrics to be able to get a more accurate idea about a site. PageRank isn’t give to new domains until the update, Technorati authority doesn’t say anything about site visitors, simply how many people link to your posts, even RSS readers for a blog aren’t accurate from feedburner.

I don’t understand why some of these advertising sites such as Text Link Ads can’t give you a piece of code that they could use to measure your site visitors and continue monitoring it. That would be the most accurate metric in my opinion.

By: Thatedeguy

Thatedeguy — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:36:38 +0000

I won’t argue that they are skewed, and that they cannot be used as a metric on their own. However, due to the lack of anything better, we make some sacrifices and try and make it as un-skewed as possible by integrating several metrics to try and balance the load.

By: From Curacao

From Curacao — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:24:41 +0000

The main problem with Compete and Alexa is that the data itself is skewed: http://www.dgfmedia.net/blog/2007/05/15/alexa-traffic-ranking-idiosyncrasy/ (pardon the link drop). So, using it to form some other metric would be skewed by default (even though you’re adding PR in the mix).

I agree that PR is something that should be kept around as a metric, but it keeps being degraded in favor of relevance (which is good). The value of PR is therefore a lot less now than it was say 5 years ago. Just wait and you will see that it will become about as useless as the keyword meta-tag is now.