Any risk to show listings with their PR?

[Abilnet]

Hello :D

Is there some kind of risk for your directory to get penalized if you're using the phpLD -feature to show listings with their Google PR ?

Started to think about this when reading Google's Information for Webmasters at:
http://news.google.com/webmasters/facts.html

There they state, for example:

Content visible to registered users only.

What do you think?

[minstrel]

The directory software doesn't repeatedly check PR as in the software Google warns about. What Google is talking about is checking the PR for several sites several times a day... if you need to do that, you are supposed to sign up for an API.

In the case of the directory, PR is checked when a page is submitted or when you do a validation via the Admin panel.

This won't violate Google's TOS. Nothing to worry about.

[Abilnet]

Hello :D

Content visible to registered users only.

Great, a Big Thanks for the clarification :D

[David]

At the same time, there is no way to know for sure unless we ask google directly. One issue would be in the case where Google just updated their index, and you have a site with thousands of links to update. In this case you would be making thousands of checks to update the pagerank.

[minstrel]

The solution is to obtain an API and then code the directory validator to use that API -- there is no charge for the API and it authorizes you for up to 1000 queries per day.

If the code also includes a way to validate say one category at a time or to limit the number of validations and "batch" the rest, which I think eventually will be required, then you'd be okay.

Unfortunately, I'm not sufficiently up to speed with either PHP or the Google API to know how to do that.

[David]

I agree that we should take a look at adding the API as a method for obtaining pagerank on future release. The only this is...does the API offer PageRank?

[ilushkin]

Content visible to registered users only.
i doubt it. i have the api it has more to do with google search.....

[minstrel]

The API does allow you to access PageRank -- that's how Shawn does it at DigitalPoint: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

[David]

Thanks, I've always wondered about that.

[Abilnet]

Interesting... so, as far as I've understood it right here (I'm not a coder) it might make sense to sign up with Google API in order to get some "API-code" - and somehow include that code to phpLD... then, the site owner has a certain amount of PR-queries per day to use on his/her directory.

Is the idea something like that? :D

[Dejavu]

Content visible to registered users only.

You cannot use the API to get pagerank.. Shawn said so himself in some threads.
He probably is just using the same hack everybody else is using.

[minstrel]

Really? Then what is the point of asking us to enter the API?

[Dejavu]

Content visible to registered users only.
It is to get the ranking for your keywords in google, the number of backlinks, number of pages in url..
Pretty much for everything except pagerank.

[yktan]

The easiest way to find out is to download the Google APIs SDK. I downloaded it and after looking through the technical documentation, it is obvious that Google APIs do not have any interface to retrieve PageRanks.

So there you have it :)

[minstrel]

???

I thought I posted this reply this afternoon but I guess I forgot to hit submit...

Either way, in order to update PageRank with a large number of entries, you are going to have to do some sort of Google query. If the procedure used the API, the TOS allows 1000 queries per day. It seems to me that even if this doesn't directly give you PR, are you not going to tick off the Google gods if you don't use the API for those queries?

[Dejavu]

There is no way to use the API to get the pagerank, directly or indirectly. To get the pagerank you must send a special query to
http: //toolbarqueries.google.com, and the API can only give you search results.
But I truly dont think google wil mind, shawn has almost 100 000 websites tracked in his tool, and while he uses the API for the ranking stuff, he gets the pagerank in the same way phplinkdirectory does.