Putting things in perspective, I believe the issue about the Google PR numbers game is at most, a relative discourse. Yuga says that bloggers should not rely on Google PageRank and Riz exposes the idea that PageRank is a wonky statistic.
Let me give an analogy of how Google PageRank works in the light of print industry. In the beginning, a lot of media buyers would rely on ONE thing when it came to advertising on print. That THING would be the claimed circulation figures that a publishing sales team would present forward. Anybody could claim a readership of 10,000 copies nationwide but in reality the print run receipt would only amount to 1,500 copies. How bad! How evil! But why is this done? There would be such arbitrary things to consider such as pass on readership figures which were all transcribed from an in house formulae which nobody had any idea how it was calculated.
Magazine stand visibility was another thing. So many of the same mag issue adorned the wooden displays at bookstores. Did it mean that the magazine sold well? No. Not really. It could simply mean that the particular issue was overstocked. There was so much market visibility BECAUSE there was very little conversion to sales. And magazine stands wouldn’t care less anyway as they stock on consignment.
What’s my point? There are so many things going on when it comes to determining what really brings influence forward. A magazine may only have 1,000 readers but what if their ads are all targeted towards the market? Advertisers still don’t realize this because the truth is, they don’t want to, and don’t have the time to dwell on such things. That’s the broker’s job.
The Google PageRank issue is proof that the online publishing / advertising industry is still in its infancy. PageRank, Technorati links, actual traffic … these are but figures which are arbitrarily defined by the industry as measures for influence and reach. But there has to be a system somewhere – a system that’s easy to understand and Google has made that system a no brainer for advertisers to grasp, using a scale of 1 to 10. And hey, who can contradict the number 1 company in the world? That’s advertising made simple.
