First page on Google yet PR0? Please solve my puzzle

I found a dating site that comes up on first and second pages of google search for very competitive keywords such as "free dating site", "free dating" and even "dating".
The site has Alexa rank of 180K overall (160K in USA) and PageRank ZERO

How is it possible? Can someone explain?
The site has 3.5K backlinks according to Google's "links:www.site.com" and 6.5K backlinks according to Yahoo's Site Explorer.

Yet page rank 0? yet first page in google for dating keywords?

Please help me solve this puzzle.

 

It's possible they have a pagerank penalty without affecting the SERPs.

 

It might be that the site started after the latest PR update and google still hasn't assigned it...

Did you analyze some of those 6.5K links in yahoo?

Without the website URL it is really hard to give you a good reason why they are ranking.

 

I just googled free dating site and the first four sites have pr3+ so if you give us url it might be useful.
But most likely it's a new website which got high ranking for a few days and now it's gone.

 

"dating" is a very competitive keyword yielding millions of sites, yet this site is on the first page....

Perhaps it is PageRank penalty but with or without it this site should not be on first pages. By the way, the domain is 2.5 years old and I've seen this site a year ago so it's been somewhere in the top for some time now...

All sites on first page have Pagerank 6 and 5, maybe 4 in some cases.

 

Pagerank does not determine your SERPs. In fact, it is much the opposite. Your SERPs do have an effect on your PR. Your statement that this site should not be on the first page solely based on its PR is unfounded, and I'm not sure how you even came to that conclusion.

There are several sites ranking for highly competitive keywords with low PRs. Ranking for any particular keyword is about SEO, not PR; PR is just one of the various benefits of SEO. So, it's highly possible that this web site has had a great deal of SEO done (and quite well it seems), and in the future, the PR may well follow.

 

As per Adam said in search camp that happened in last febraury PR is one of the 200+ factors that are considered for SERPS.

But this is so theory. We all see high PR websites being ranked for competitive keywords. It is so surprising for me to see a PR 0 website for such competitive keywords. What's wrong in sharing the url alex. If you can through some light on URL we can dig and probably guess what is happeneing.

DP members waiting for your reply?

 

Hey guys,
I just don't want to promote this site, but this is the url: luvfree[dot]com
With thousands of links it's not possible to have PR0 for a site that's 2.5 years old. So I guess it must be some kind of penalty. But what's the point to penalize PR if it does not affect SERP?

As I read PR is the most important factor for SERP. PR is calculated by the number of links, I even found some formulas on the Internet.... How else can search engine know the placement of a site? Only by how long it's been established (domain age) and how popular it is - links. Of course, it also checks how relevent it is for specific keywords but links and domain are the most important factors.

 

PR Is far from being the most important thing for SERP. PR is calculate by several things not only links and those formulas are just suppositions.

You aren't understanding the big picture in SEO. If it was only a matter of domain and links than anybody could buy my-white-house.info (for example) spam 1.000.000 forums and blogs with the anchor text "White House" and in your theory they would rank in the top 10 for "White House". We are not in the late 90's anymore! The search engines have evolved and are now extremely "smart".

Yes, domain, back links, pr are important for ranking but they are just a piece of the cake.

Stop reading forums and blogs and buy yourself a book from a reputable source, once you are done reading and applying/testing what you have learned than go back to forums and blogs, at least by then you'll know what to believe...

 

Sorry to say, my friend, but PR is still the most important factor in determining SERPs. In fact, PR was invented specifically for determining the order of SERPS.

There's other important factors, like relevancy, anchor text, number of outbound links on the page linking to you, etc... but PR is still the most important, and will be for the foreseeable future

 

It's not just links. It's the quality of those links. You want links on relevant quality sites with good popularity that don't have alot of outbound links on them.

 

So you are saying that a PR 2 site can not out rank a PR 6? Have you checked the SERPS in the last yearS? PR was created to determining a quality of a domain/site not rankings.

 

No, I'm saying that YOUR site will rank better as a PR6 than it will as a PR2.

 

A PR6 site will be spidered more often and if it has a better optimization than a PR3 domain it can outrank it, but this doesn't mean that a lower PR domain can not out rank it EASILY. Which shows that PR is only a part of the SERPS. Sure a high PR site will have more possibility of ranking highly but having an high PR by itself doesn't guarantee anything, specially it won't guarantee high rankings.

Anybody can check this instantly! Pick a 5 different keywords randomly and check the top ten results, 99.9% of times a site with a lower PR will outrank a domain with a higher PR.

 

That's misleading, and not comparing apples to apples.

If you take 2 sites that are EXACTLY the same, the one with higher PR will rank higher, for every keyword and key phrase, 100% of the time.

There are TONs on factors involved when determining the order of a SERP. . PR is the most important, but that doesn't mean that a site with lower PR but better other factors can't out rank a site with higher PR. That's been well known for 10 years or more.

But, the best way to move YOUR site up it to build popularity though quality backlinks. You should also do everything you can with ON PAGE SEO as well, but it won't give you quite the bang for the buck that increasing your popuarity wil.

 

Title Tags, content and quality back links will outrank PR any day! Those are the 3 most important things out of the hundreds.

If you want to know the most important factors for ranking you can read this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-factors-version-2-released and http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors which was created by the most respected SEOs in the industry.

 

How do you think google calculates your quality backlinks. Why, with PageRank of course!

For those of you following along, this is basicaly a discussion about the two basic factors in any SEO effort.

ON Page factors - These are things that are on YOUR website. They include things like Title tags, key word prominence, keyword proximity, internal link structure, internal link anchor text, etc.

OFF Page factors - These include things like quality backlinks (pagerank), anchor text in those inks, reevency of the site that link to you, number of backlinks on the sites that link to you, etc.

Any good SEO campaign should worry about BOTH on page factors and off page factors. Normally, I assume that most people already understand and have done as much as they can with on page optimization. I'll agree that if you have not done any on page optimization, then you should absolutely start there.

 

The conversation started when I said that PR wasn't the most important thing when ranking a site

PR is only a part of the quality of the incoming links as you are stating, we both agree on that. I'm not saying that PR has no value but it is clearly not the most important thing as far as search rankings. It has some value but it isn't the MOST important thing!

Of course there are hundreds of on page and off page factors when optimizing a site but PR isn't in my nor in any SEO that has a clue top 10 list.

 

I see. Well, I'll agree, if you haven't optimized your own site yet, then yes, that would be more important. Most software comes pretty close to doing that out of the box, though, which is why I tend to take it for granted.

That said, PR is still the most important off page factor.

 

LOL! I'm not even going start with automated or semi-automated softwares...

PR is one of the important factors you should look into when building links, agreed on that.

Now going back to the thread:

It is weird that luvfree[dot]com has a PR0 considering the age, amount of pages indexed and backlinks. At least that comes to show that PR has absolutely no relevancy as far as rankings!