Originally Posted by Pleasurepays

... but Google does. Google cares very much. That's what Google does (and almost all search engines). The Page Rank formula itself (i.e. the heart and soul of Google) is an accurate predictor of surfer behavior on a site/network of sites. Its a measurement of the probability that you will end up on page A... click to page B and then skip to a new domain's page A and so on.... resulting in a probability distribution of surfer clicks across all pages online... which IS the resulting page rank value for each page. This is EXACTLY how your site is being viewed.

and guess what? blind links/skims screw with that click distribution probability model in the worst way.

This is also why the typical TGP model is fucked for search engines - 200-300 outbound links significantly decreases the probability of any link being clicked on and a page being visited (i.e. making a page more important than others) - this is why almost all tgp's have a main page toolbar PR value of 2 or 3 or whatever, with almost all other pages having no value. (i.e. the amount of "link juice" being passed to any page is distributed across ALL outbound links from that page)


personally... again, i don't care. i think the conversations are interesting... and i also find it interesting watching people resist inevitable change and their refusal to change.