Broadcasting Brain

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion has written a blog post saying that Google Page Rank is the Ultimate Measure of Online Influence, although he does admit that it’s not perfect. As a little exercise in analysis and logic, I am going to take his thoughts and see whether or not I come to a similar conclusion.

First, however, I want to pull out a relevant quote from Rubel’s article where he talks about unique visitors and page views, statistics which some people have suggested as a means of measuring influence and success of a blog:

Unique visitors and page views - which I said was dying back in 2006 and is dead as far as I am concerned - are also largely empty numbers. Lots of people visit my blog. However, many of them arrive via Google, the web’s version of Ellis Island. And then they’re gone.

Rubel seems to be saying that Google search results bring traffic that doesn’t stick around. If the traffic doesn’t stay, it’s likely not relevant, useful or interesting to the person performing the search. If that’s the case, it seems unlikely to me that content found by Google Search will make an impression on the person who has visited the website – bounce rate is one way to measure whether or not readers find content relevant.

To me, influence is a quality that has an affect on attitudes, behavior, or both. If something is influential, it will have an impact on how a person thinks, what they believe, and, ultimately, how they behave (e.g. what they say and what they do).

So, following Rubel’s logic, I find it hard to believe that traffic delivered by Google Search is in a position to be influenced if it doesn’t stick around.

However, when you look at Rubel’s three reasons why Google Page Rank rules, Page Rank’s ability to deliver traffic via search engine results is one of those key reasons (see below).

Let’s look at his three reasons in a bit more detail:

1) Page Rank is something you earn by producing high quality content that people link to - or what John Bell describes as socially connected

Considerations: Page Rank can be different for each website/profile you own AND for individual webpages on a website – influence is not a uniform, even thing for a person. Clever SEO practitioners can do things that either temporarily change Page Rank or else compensate for its power, though.

2) It enables you to influence people on the Internet’s biggest stage - Google - and just as people are searching for the topics you are knowledgeable about. This means it amplifies your influence because the press start at search engines when researching stories.

The essence of this argument is that journalists look to online influencers to research news stories and Google Search is a popular way to find them. No question, that makes a lot of sense and it might well be true for journalists who don’t already know who the experts and influencers are in various domains. Just like any search request, you’re going to focus first on the top result from the Google search and then work your way down, as necessary, until you find the answer that you’re looking for. Assuming the top result is usually the most frequently clicked on, then this idea is logical.

However, Page Rank is not the only factor that determines Google search results, as previously mentioned. It’s not clear exactly how much influence Page Rank has on calculating search engine results; any number of practitioners will argue that Page Rank isn’t the force that it once was. We could assume that it has a major impact, but it’s not the only factor. After all, if two pages on the same topic have the same Page Rank, one of them will have to come first, so there must be some other logic to control search engine rankings. It gets even more complex when 20 pages on the same topic have the same Page Rank. There have to be multiple factors that have an impact on where a website falls within search engine rankings.

If people routinely used the Google toolbar that shows a website’s Page Rank, or if Google included the Page Rank score right on the search results page beside each result, it would strength this argument.

3) Finally, Page Rank is channel agnostic and takes the entire online ecosystem into account. It judges you based on links from all kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank. In other words, it goes beyond people who hang out on Twitter who love people who Tweet or bloggers who link to other bloggers, etc. It eschews the echo chamber

I don’t disagree with this idea, except the idea of Page Rank eschewing the echo chamber. I would argue that the echo chamber, leading to multiple links on a topic, would actually enhance Page Rank over time.

Rubel has stated that Google Page rank is not a perfect measurement. Fair enough.

Is there any better metric though? That’s a good question. Perhaps the problem is that Rubel appears to be relying on a single metric to measure online influence. Edelman (Rubel’s employer) has published different white papers and reports suggesting that online influence might best be calculated by using an index of factors (I’ve also written a post about influencers). An index makes intuitive sense to me, although I don’t know how much work has been done in perfecting this kind of index.

Steve Rubel has written a thought-provoking post and he’s certainly done some serious thinking about it. On the surface, Google Page Rank would seem to be a logical, reasonable indicator of online influence, but I don’t think I’d put too much faith in it because of its limitations.

One closing thought: wouldn’t conversion (i.e. clicking links that the online influencer wants you to click) be a better measure of influence?

What do you think? What are some ways that you would measure online influence? Or is it even relevant?

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