How important is pr to the algo?

[maney]

Sorry if this question crops up alot

I see alot of people striving for higher pr (myself included to a certain extent), I understand a good use of pr is to sell links to people. But, as traffic is king here, how important is pr as regards to serp placement? It must play some part, but how big is the part?

[The Webmaster]

PR(Pagerank) doesnt effect your SERP...
There are many examples where a site with low PR ranks higher than a high PR site..
Infact Pagerank is not a factor of google's ranking algo, howeve its an outcome of your linking afforts and scheme...As much high PR links you got for your site
as high PR you will get for that page..

[BrianR2]

that has been disputed quite a bit. i don't think anyone outside of google knows the exact answer. we know it's one of hundreds of factors. keep in mind that the toolbar pagerank (the one the public sees) is not the same as google's internal pagerank, and some people will go as far as to say it counts for almost nothing. I'm inclined to think that the real pr algorithm is the most important single factor out of the hundreds (assuming that relevancy and content are calculated using multiple factors). pr is proportional to the quality of backlinks that google uses to determine the "importance" of a page and quality backlinks definitely make a big difference in google, hence the pr algorithm should still be a big player.

[The Webmaster]

Originally Posted by BrianR2

we know it's one of hundreds of factors.

This is the biggest misconception about PR...
PR isnt a factor of Ranking algo, its an outcome of your linking strategy...

i.e. Pagerank is an outcome of linking factors..

[BrianR2]

Originally Posted by The Webmaster

PR(Pagerank) doesnt effect your SERP...
There are many examples where a site with low PR ranks higher than a high PR site..
Infact Pagerank is not a factor of google's ranking algo, howeve its an outcome of your linking afforts and scheme...As much high PR links you got for your site
as high PR you will get for that page..

True, pagerank is a result of linking efforts but it does play a part in the algorithm especiallly since backlinks are central to google's algorithm.

Google says that PageRank is one of hundreds of factors in their ranking algorithm and that it's at the heart of it.

The reason why sites with lower pagerank often rank higher than sites with higher pagerank is because there are many other factors taken into consideration. If pagerank was the only factor taken into account in the ranking algorithm then of course the serps would be organized by pr but that's obviously not the case.

[maney]

So, PR is a measure of the quality/quantity of your backlinks and backlinks are a factor in determining serp but they aren't actually related?

[BrianR2]

PR is not related to your SERPs but your SERPs are related to your PR because it is factored into the SERP algo.

[emuut]

I dont understand seodan .. can you say that in simple terms

[IamNed]

PR doesnt mean too much. Age of site is farmore important as well as diversity of inbound links. a single inbound high PR sites carries far less weight than tons of low Pr sites from relavant sources.

[Obelia]

I agree, PR doesn't mean too much on its own. You will need lots of relevant text on those inbound links to rank well, and good on-page relevancy.

But a high-ranking page on a competitive term will usually need to have high PR, because you don't get to be considered very relevant without a bunch of links pointing to your site with all the right anchor text and other ingredients.

It's a bit like asking how important salt is to your soup.

[BrianR2]

Originally Posted by IamNed

PR doesnt mean too much. Age of site is farmore important as well as diversity of inbound links. a single inbound high PR sites carries far less weight than tons of low Pr sites from relavant sources.

True, PR is logarithmic so 1 PR 8 is worth a lot more than 2 PR 4's for instance. Relevancy is definitely a very big factor so if the high pr site is not relevant it won't be worth as much in the SERPs as many low pr relevant links.

[stlgatekeeper]

Page rank might not be directly related to search engine positioning directly but it is related to your site or page ranking obliquely.

The PR displayed in the toolbar IS a "trust" factor. This trust factor is taken into account into the algo which then displays the results.

So... the answer is YES ... PR is important to ranking of pages and sites.

[jg123]

I think it is important for ranking well in google serp's. Here is Matt Cutts quote

"One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages. So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submit a sitemap), that doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply."

[TimeIsMoney]

Having a high pr sure helps you to gain trust from the visitors. Low pr sites, most importantly, commercial sites, need customer trust. It is there to say also, for how much time has that site been in business and how is it valuable in relation to the other sites of it's type.

[vistadivine.com@gmail.com]

Ya thats right PR is not a factor for your rankings in Google.

[hooperman]

Originally Posted by TimeIsMoney

Having a high pr sure helps you to gain trust from the visitors. Low pr sites, most importantly, commercial sites, need customer trust. It is there to say also, for how much time has that site been in business and how is it valuable in relation to the other sites of it's type.

Your average customer doesn't even know what PR is. The (small) group of people who do know what PR is, is divided into those who do and those who don't care.

Given the number of times that PR is referred to in Google (and Matt Cutts') info, I would say that PR is still used, but to what extent who knows?

[IamNed]

Originally Posted by TimeIsMoney

Having a high pr sure helps you to gain trust from the visitors. Low pr sites, most importantly, commercial sites, need customer trust. It is there to say also, for how much time has that site been in business and how is it valuable in relation to the other sites of it's type.

99.99% of visitors can care less about that little green bar

[asdfghjkl]

in fact i would say most viewers don't care less. if they knows we will all be out of job.

[Keith Taylor]

In short, this and all other PR threads can be summed up by saying that nobody knows nuthin' 'bout nuthin'. If you don't work for Google you don't know how it works - and even if you do work there, you probably still won't understand it.

[timothy104]

PR has to have some effect on SERPs, but it isn;t as important as it used to be because Google learned people began to manipulate pr