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Technical Director at Box UK
30 November 2004 17:37pm
We've been considering joining the W3C (www.w3.org) for a few years now. As a company that makes heavy use of - and contributes towards the development of - a whole array of emerging XML technologies, being able to contribute more directly to their direction would be useful. However, with the membership cost being relatively high (can't remember exactly, but a couple of thousand pounds at least), we still haven't made a decision.
More recently though, the W3C have started rotating links to their members pages on the W3C homepage. Their homepage has a Google pagerank of 10 - so my question is to the SEO experts - what 'value' does this link provide, in terms of increasing the PR of member homepages?
Dan
Online Marketing / SEO at forum30.co.uk
01 December 2004 09:51am
The link from the members page will provide some benefit as it's a permanent link. Although the PR passed on to the member's homepages will be 'diluted' as there are another 300+ links on the page.
The link from the homepage wouldn't provide any long-term benefit, because as soon as it is removed from the page any PR benefit will be lost.
The benefits of trying to obtain a high PageRank are vastly overstated. However, there is definitely a benefit from obtaining links from pages with a high PR as Google will 'rate' that link as more important than a link from a page with a low PR.
There are obvious benefits from becoming a member of the W3C - but I wouldn't consider SEO to be a deciding factor on whether or not you invest your money there or not.
Cheers,
Daniel
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Daniel Phillips
Big Picture Interactive
http://www.bigpictureinteractive.co.uk
CEO at Econsultancy
01 December 2004 10:37am
I'd agree completely that, all things being equal, PageRank is quite a red herring for the most valuable traffic, particularly if you are operating in a niche.
By way of example from our own experience we currently rank 3rd in Google.co.uk for a search on 'user experience' which links through to our recently published Online Retail User Experience Benchmarks. Which is obviously good for us and is driving sales / subscriptions as a result.
However, what's the PageRank of that destination page? Zero. 0/10.
Incidentally, we've noticed that Google appears to apply quite a rankings weighting depending on the recency of publication of the content. Just a few days ago we were No. 1 on the same search and, I suspect, give it a week and we may have dropped further.
Either way, I wouldn't factor SEO into your thinking for the W3C membership. I'd justify it more in terms of credibility / brand.
Ashley
SEO at Cheapflights Media
07 December 2004 10:40am
Whilst I would definitely agree that Google’s PageRank values reported in the toolbar certainly don’t mean as much as they used to, I wouldn’t overlook the power of a PageRank 10 link.
That said, if the majority of links that point to your site are considerably lower than PR10 it is likely there will be a dampening effect on this link.
I’d agree with the credibility benefits outweighing those of SEO.
comtique
22 April 2006 12:35pm
Ive just started an experiment which involves getting a pagerank 0 site to a pagerank 10 within 2 years...
If your interested you can read my blog at www.pagerank10.co.uk/blog
Lee Kelly
SEO at Cheapflights Media
24 April 2006 09:13am
you can do it within months with this technique if you really want to.