PageRank - The Game Keeps Changing

Chris Richardson wrote last Friday that the feathers of the SEO community were ruffled when a Google's representative said that the PageRank bar in the Google Toolbar was for "entertainment purposes only" This was quickly countered by Google Guy, who is the regular but anonymous, go-between Google and the SEO community.

Frankly I think the cat is out of the bag and it's about time. The use of linking to rate web pages has distorted search engine results in a number of manners:

1. Preoccupied people with SEO tricks instead of the content of their site.

2. Created an artificial market for the exchange and/or sale of links.

3. Blinded people to the fact that link building's main purpose is to build traffic from related sites. One link at a time.

No matter what people say about SEO techniques it has to be looked at as an economic game. The search engines consistently change how they rate pages and the SEO community responses in turn, a continuous cycle. It's that same thing as hackers vs. computer security and anti-virus companies, like Symantec and McAfee, with the economic stakes not being quite as high.

The real question is this, is the search engine/search engine optimizer like the relationship between a shark and a pilot fish or is it more parasitic? This is where the whole black hat vs. white hat discussion comes from. But the problem is deeper then that, linking as been "tagged" as a method of building traffic. It's no longer a being considered for its own sake. The original Google/Stanford patent/method has changed the game forever. The "pure" cooperative academic link is a thing of the past. Market forces are driving competition for quantity/quality links.

Is there really any doubt that the linking has twisted market forces and become a game in and of itself? Here is a list of the products and service that people use to increase links to they site.

1. SEO software that advises the building of links with matching key words and phrases, like WebPosition Gold, Internet Business Promoter, and Web CEO.

2. Link building software like Zeus and Arelis.

3. Linking building services, some which charge a per link basis plus others that charge a higher fee for site with a higher PageRank.

4. IP cloaking services and software.

5. Link Cooperatives.

6. Intranet, mini-site, linking.

Notice I didn't pass judgment on any of the listed methods. The real "rule" in the SE/SEO relationship is that the rules can't stay the same if the search results are going to continue to be relevant.

Even if PagePank was created to "do no evil", the situation has changed. So when someone at Google says that PageRank is for entertainment purposes that someone is admitting that the game has changed, even if the official party line stays the same. Too many people know how to cook the results so Google has modified its algorithm, SEO its your move.