EatonWeb uses a combination of metric factors to determine the value of a website. However, we are planning to phase out PageRank in our metric over the next 12 months because, quite honestly, we no longer feel that it’s an accurate reflector of site value. Not to mention the empirical observation that our directory rankings were more accurate before the recent PageRank penalties were handed out. We’re doing this for the sake of quality….the quality of our directory.

Google has been systematically introducing the equivalent of theoretical epicycles to its display of PageRank to the public, and we think it’s about time to face the facts. You can’t manually penalize hundreds of influential sites and expect to be used as a reliable source of information any longer.

In fact, we believe that PageRank epicycles are chinks in the Google armor and that Google needs to make a major strategical decision going forward to preserve its influence in the webmaster community. And in the end, it’s going to come down to whether Google can accurately determine the value of each independent link, buffering the outflow of poor quality links, rather than inaccurately painting an artificially depressed picture of site authority.