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The idea behind this trend is that better page rankings make a community easier to find. Although there is a truth to the idea that making your forum rank higher in searches will get you more sign-ups, there are some problems with this line of reasoning.
First of all Google PageRank isn't really relevant for a forum. A high page rank may help somewhat with SEO, but it will never help to keep the community itself active. In other words, what good is a high search engine ranking and a flood of new visitors if there is no activity in the community to support your member base, and nothing to attract new signups?
In this article we will take a closer look at Google's page ranking system, and at how it fails when it comes to forums.
A Look at Google Page Rank
Before we discuss page rankings for forums, let's cover the PageRank system itself.
Google created page rankings as an easy way to represent the popularity of a website. The idea behind page rank is that the more links that a website has pointing to it, the more popular the site must be.
To gauge a site's popularity Google will count the number of one-way links to that site, analyze the popularity of the site that provides a link, and also analyze the relevancy of each link. With this data, Google's system calculates a page rank. In other words PageRank is a single number that represents the popularity of a web site.
Although this system works for a regular website (assuming people aren't cheating the system by buying relevant links), it doesn't work well for a forum.
Google Page Rank and Forums
For a bulletin board, the page rank numbers are somewhat irrelevant. They do count to a certain degree on the front page of the forum. But the threads themselves (the important content on the site) are rarely rated properly.
In fact, by the time a single page of a forum has a good page rank; it is usually considered an old post. The thread may have held the most useful information on the web, and it may get hundreds of replies; but, since no one is linking to it, the page rank is still quite low.
The same idea holds true for the forums in their entirety. An old forum, which no longer houses an active community, will often have a much higher page rank than the newer active community. The reason for this is quite simple. Many people have happened across old threads and linked to them to provide information to others. This hasn't happened with the newer site yet.
What it takes to rank a forum, is a look at aspects that matter to community.
Let Page Rank Take Care of Itself, and Focus on the Community
If you wanted a gauge to the health of an online community you would have to account for many factors. Member count, the activity of those members, thread count, posting activity, and more would be have to be taken into account to gain a picture of where the forum really ranks when compared to another (the factors that BoardsMD - http://www.boardsmd.com - looks at).
Over time, as more people begin to link to the information on the forum, the page rank will grow automatically. A forum administrator shouldn't waste their time working on improving page rankings. The focus should always be on the community itself, and on the members. With a healthy active community, page ranks will take care of themselves, and your site will be more valuable to members since your focus is always on forum health.
Is it really dead?
In an online forum post from WebProWorld.com (A discussion on Google), people from all over are speculating about what is going on. In fact, one member was quick to point out that the last big shift Google had, we saw the PR system go down as well. This begs the question...
Are we on the verge of a BIG PR shift? or,
Are we seeing a Google marketing scheme just to shake people up?
In many ways, Google needs to be improved upon their "broken down PR system". There are so many areas if they payed attention to forums and blogs all around the world, they would have more than enough feedback about their PR system to fix this growing PR issue.
Page ranking is a potentially a great system. It CAN be a great system if it directly ranks websites properly by content, relevance, and not simply by the number of links pointing to an individual website.
These days, you see a website with 15 "medium relevant" links pointing to it while its front page holds a PR of 7-8 out of 10. How do you justify that?
What will it mean if Google's PR systems stays down?
I believe it will mean a big shift to online marketing. Many newbies out there that are barely legal when it comes to SEO have an opportunity to measure everything they do. In turn, the newbies may even sound professional to their clients. Take away these tools and you are left with true marketing gurus that have stood the test of time and can deliver results for themselves and their clients.
The internet is vastly growing into a pool of professional fakes and scammers. This is really giving the internet marketing community a bad name. Without the Google PR, many people won't be able to prove their results nor will they have that "fake respect" that you get from having a website with PR 7/10.
What about MSN & Yahoo?
In growing efforts to keep up with MSN & Yahoo's strong and growing marketing campaign, Google may be feeling left out these days. Many people think that their PR system is simply a gimmick; a gimmick that attracts a lot of attention. By disabeling this system, you create mass fear and confusion. Bad publicity is still publicity neverless?
So, is Google trying to create a buzz?
This could be possible and it could be possible that everything will be back to normal within a couple of days. We won't know until time catches up with us.
Until then, take this "dark saga" moment and find other ways to build your business online. Don't worry about what Google is doing, worry about what you are doing to improve your internet marketing campaign.