What is pagestrength

[ZigE]

I see it floating around in seo topics, (much less so than pagerank.)

How is it calculated? and what relevance does it pay in backlinks, and so onto rankings.

When looking for potential backlinks, is pagestrength an important consideration to take into account?

;?

[polspoel]

You should read the articles on this site, most is explained there.

[ZigE]

I've read most, if not all of the articles. :)

From what I can gather its just an arbitrary figure, that takes into account Age of site, alexa ranking, backlinks, different page backlinks, crap like that.

I was initially prompted to this topic, as I'm curious as to why people spend $300 odd dollars on a yahoo directory listing. And I know chris has also said he sometimes uses this.
Is the trusted link from dir.yahoo, and all the 'pagestrength' from that, which google loves, or purely for click-throughs?

I've just noticed alot of well ranked sites that have little more than a yahoo directory backlink, ranking very well on google.

[Chris]

Page Strength is a completely meaningless figure. It takes into account numerous things that SEs do not, and does so in a way that they do not.

No search engine uses "Page Strength" it is just something the people at a search engine optimization company made up.

It is an interesting, it is a good way to check a lot of different metrics of your site at once, and I could see checking it when doing due diligence before purchasing a site, but you should in no-way-shape-or-form consider it as a factor in search engines, it isn't.

"PageRank" is what Google actually uses, and other search engines use something similar to PageRank (without giving it a name).

[ZigE]

Alright, then what is the deal with the yahoo directory, many of the subcategories hold very little in the way of pagerank value, but people are willing to fork out 300 yearly. Is there a 'trust' value associated with a link from the directory? :sick:

[Chris]

You get good amount of traffic from Yahoo directory links themselves, and also Yahoo values them highly in their search algorithm.

[GeorgeB]

Yeah I get decent traffic jfrom a Yahoo directory link. I didn't pay for it I just submitted it.

[ZigE]

You get good amount of traffic from Yahoo directory links themselves, and also Yahoo values them highly in their search algorithm.

Thanks for clearing that up chris. Funnily enough yahoo doesn't rank my site well at all. 1st in msn, 4/5 in google. No where to be seen in yahoo. Probably because I dont have a large amount of backlinks.


Yeah I get decent traffic jfrom a Yahoo directory link. I didn't pay for it I just submitted it.

Non-commercial site I assume

[Muggle]

From what I've read about page strength, it's an alternative to Google PR and Alexa site rankings, then why doesn't Google take it into consideration?

[stymiee]

Because they already have PageRank which does everything they need. Page strength is a gimmick. Nothing more.

And Alexa is worthless.

[Chris]

From what I've read about page strength, it's an alternative to Google PR and Alexa site rankings, then why doesn't Google take it into consideration?
Why would they? It was made up by a bunch of people at a SEO firm who have no experience whatsoever in running a search engine. It uses Yahoo too for most of it's information, not Google. It favors certain niches of sites because of where it values backlinks from, and it is grossly in accurate even within it's own metrics due to problems with the yahoo searches it pulls data from. (for instance one of my sites gets credited with only 14 DMOZ links when searching directly on DMOZ shows it has 250+).

PageRank is actually used by search engines.

Alexa rankings, while not entirely accurate, are direct traffic rankings based off of a decent sample size.

This tool just arbitrarily assigns value to various link sources and then from those sources derives a strength that is entirely meaningless to everyone except the webmaster of a site, or maybe a webmaster seeking to buy the site. It is a nice tool to quickly report backlink totals from a few different sources, but every time I see people wanting search engines to take it into account I want to kick them in the head.