After writing about the psychological power of the little green bar we know as PageRank, I decided to put my theory to the test at DP. I used nothing more than a simple poll to see whether, after reading my thoughts on how PR might effect people, if it would change minds. I wasn’t at all surprised by the results, which showed a healthy 381 people had read the thread but only 32 daring to dip their toe into the realms of admitting what their views were. (at the time of writing this blog). When I let the cat out of the bag via p.m that it was a test with loaded questions, it went even quieter and no-one else replied. Chinese whispers at work again perhaps? I can almost hear people uttering, ‘What’s this all about?’, or ‘what’s the catch?’ or even ‘I’m not telling’.

For the record it was a test, but only a test of my hypothesis that there is indeed some mileage to my theory that PageRank does indeed have psychological powers most of us don’t even see.

The simple question posed was accompanied by a multiple choice option, because after all things aren’t always black and white.

Is Page Rank important to a Directory?

Yes, the higher it is the better. 53%

Yes, but it isn’t the only thing that counts. 28%

Maybe, but I don’t really care if mine has no PR. 6%

No, PR is a load of crap that should be scrapped. 12.5%There’s several ways to conduct polls, you can hold then open or closed, I want to make it absolutely clear before I continue that in no way do the results regardless of what they are suggest that any one of these answers would have been right or wrong. When it comes to PR there simply isn’t a right or wrong.Anyway, so what did the poll tell us?

Ignoring the fact that people on this particular forum weren’t overly willing to ’show their hand’, it illustrated quite a lot. From those that did take the time to vote we saw that there is STILL a significant leaning toward PR , in fact an overwhelming 53% went for the first answer, these are the people who think that PR is vital; I’ll look into why a little more later. Next we had the ‘hedging my bet’ voters, those were the ones who neither want to ‘over commit’, by saying PR is the next best thing since sliced bread, but neither do they want to dismiss it; they took up 28%. The third question got 6% of the vote, with the fourth 12.5%, being people who dismiss PR as nothing but a waste of cyberspace.

So what’s the conclusion?

Its clear that despite all that’s happened over the past 6 months or so the majority of directory owners still appear to still think PR is the be all and end all of when it comes to the importance it plays in directories, worse still they openly admit that it will help increase submissions and that would be the sole purpose of a high PR! Its not a view I particularly share but I deliberately refrained from voting because this wasn’t about me, its about the directory owners populous as a whole. Besides, this is only the beginning of my quest to evaluate the efficacy of PR.

So why is it despite all that has happened and the way directories have been penalized do the majority of owners still think that the higher the PR the better?

Are they seeing something the rest of us aren’t?

Can people really believe that what happened once can’t, or won’t happen again? Are people so naive to still be thinking a higher PR attracts more submissions? It certainly seems that way at first glance, but I’m not so sure, and the Q&A left me with more questions than answers. We know for a fact that Google have, and likely will continue to address PR and the abuse of it by selling its juice so we have to rule that one out don’t we? So, if there’s no benefit from PR what possible reason can there be for thinking it is of any value? Could it really be psychological as I suggested in my previous post?

I’d like to think it IS more to do with the psychological lure of the little green bar, because if it isn’t there is only really one other avenue we can explore isn’t there? GREED! Regardless of the countless warnings of penalisation and risk of being completely de-indexed, people are STILL going all out for PR! But is it greed or is it vanity, or worse, is it insanity? How many of us have checked our PR before, during, and after each update; how good do you feel when its high compared to how you feel when its low?

You can infer what you like from the one’s brave enough to post replies, and from what I could tell it appeared clear that people just don’t get it, that PR is nothing, its just a little green bar with a number attached to it, nothing more, nothing less. But wait… maybe they do, maybe those people who still maintain that high PR is a must actually realize the psychological importance of the little green bar! Isn’t it normal for people to want to be associated with the strongest and the best? Even though the directory with the highest PR may not be the best, (rarely they are), they still come across as being something ‘more’ than the directory with the lower PR.

I’d put money on it that if you lined up 10 directories with differing levels of PR from 0 - 10 most people would go for the 10 without batting an eyelid. This would probably be moreso the case if they had to pay for the link because they perceive the higher PR as giving ‘more value for money’, when in reality we all know this not always to be the case.

So maybe we’ve hit the nail on the head here as to why perhaps people will always go for the higher PR? Its the ‘perception‘ (nice psychological term) that the higher the better, just as the bigger the better. Anyone who’s honest with themselves would agree that we would invariably go for what we perceived to be the best, and not necessarily the best. I know as a rule of thumb I would. And this is where I can confidently conclude that PR does indeed have a massive psychological ability. Thanks to Google’s stressing that PR is only awarded to sites with relevancy and quality links pointing into them, combined with perhaps some other factors, (probably some we don’t even know about) they’ve ‘created’ a psychological monster.

I’m not convinced they did this deliberately, probably not. But the fact is, they HAVE. The psychology of the little green bar has been born. Thanks to the abusers of this mystical little widget its been nurtured into a ‘must have’ tool of survival in the dog eat dog world of the directory.

As human beings we’ve been programmed to survive, the strongest invariably survive the longest, we all know that. It’s the same in any walk of life. The strong survive, the weak don’t. So couldn’t we apply this principle of needing to be ‘the strongest to survive’ to the directory owner? I think we can.

But there’s a desire to ‘appear strong’ as opposed to actually ‘being strong’ which is something that needs to be approached with caution. We’ve already seen people get punished by trying to cheat the natural evolution of PR and its use, almost to the point of extinction! It was only at the whim of Google that those who tried to cheat evolution that they never became extinct.

I’ve often heard the phrase “Google is God”, which whether we like it or not, at this present stage they are, if your not indexed in Google you have far less chance to survive, its as simple as that. Because they command such a large percentage of the search market, you’d be a fool to say otherwise. So to use the analogy of Google being God, this particular God created a child, only this baby was that little green bar!

I’m going to end on this note to avoid making the post too long. Its so easy to get carried away with the fascination of trying to understand this phenomenon. There is a next stage, but before I post that I hope that at least one or two of you will come and share YOUR views on this. This isn’t a sermon on what you should or shouldn’t believe, its an observational study of PR. I will never profess to be right or wrong, only you can be the judges of that. But by inputting into the subject in a constructive way we can perhaps start to nurture this creation of the little green bar to work for us not against.

Worse case scenario is no-one posts a reply, I’ll still post the next blog, but it won’t be a concerted effort it will be just one man’s observations on the little green bar. I’ll cover those who ’sit on the fence’, those who simply say they ‘don’t know’, to those who simply say that ‘PR is a total waste of time’. I’d much rather you have your own say than for me to make assumptions, you have the chance right here and you can even stay anonymous if you like.

To be continued…