I just don’t get Google’s thinking: First they tell you ‘use nofollow’ then they discount thousands of links for any of a hundred reasons even when they are legitimate votes. It seems that they are really trying to count only the votes they want to count, and not a single one more.

The trouble is: their definitions vary over time; and I really don’t get it. Yet there are dozens of searches I know of where the results aren’t useful at all, especially name searches which bring up dozens of irrelevant directories, etc…

According to Yahoo Site explorer, one of my sites has over 5000 inlinks, and yet Google only counts 2 links. 2 out of over 5000 links. The whole linking game for PR makes less and less sense over time, to me and to my searches.

Why? Why? Could it be that the Google machine is producing good results, but that the PR system is seriously broken.

Here is my rational: the whole link economy runs into billions of links, but if you discount 95% of them (in my case over 99%), then it follows that Google’s system is systematically becoming less democratic (was it ever?), less tolerant, and much more elitist than ever.

An example: John Chow’s site has 2,380 links in Google currently, but when you turn to Yahoo Site explorer (counting exclusive links), you will see over 230,000 links. In other words, even for John’s site, 98.94% of the links are discounted.

What this means is that once you lose 99% of the non-countable links, each link is somehow worth magically more PR points because the remaining links are considered elitist compared to the rest of the links thus junked. Doesn’t this exacerbate the link buying phenomenon even more?