In light of the update, finally! A basic question. People say here all the time the only benefit to PR is for link sellers and directory owners. 1. What is the exact relationship between (google's internal)PR and SERP results? 2. Is there a difference between building links for PR or for SERP? 3. In terms of SERP results, does a PR6 link hold a lot more value than a PR4 considering relevancy and all other factors are the same? How the PR rating of a page with a link affect the SERP results? Basic questions, I know, but worth discussing. If your businesses is not selling links but building sites this should be good.
SERP and PR are two different concepts. Your PR can go down and still you could be featuring high on serp results. SERP is a function of SEO and content where PR is a function of your backlinks.
so the question remains. SERP includes many factors with relevant being prime rib. How much does the PR of those relevant links factors into the SERP equation? How much does SERP care about PR?
your pr means nothing. a link on a higher pr will give you more weight then a lower pr link. so yes,there are many factors and pagerank is one of them.
Link Development 101 -- The more links you have from highly authoritative (high PR), highly relevant sites, the higher your SERPs and the higher your PR per page. You must have a nice architecture for distributed PR and you must have a content rich site with SEO on-page optimization. Traffic is key, PR rules and content is king with (authoritative, relevant, high-ranking) links as the queen
here a small tool to check PR/SERP average http://livepr.ezer.com/pagerank_average.asp maybe it can help you
This just may be a coincidence but here are my noob observations. I started my first website in January, (just a hobby) After the first rush of visitors (from me spamming all my mates) traffic died down to a trickle. I was getting between 0 and 30 visits a day, mainly from search engines. (here are the search engine stats) 73 visits in March, 92 visits in April, 135 visits in May, 205 visits in June, 357 visits in July, As you can see the traffic was slowly going up.. I had built a small site for my brother in May and had linked it to my site. I also do a lot of posting on forums so my sig had been linking to my site as well. (don't think that counts as a backlink though) 473 visits in August, At the start of August I brought an expired domain that turned out to be PR1, So I made a page and linked it to mine.. 703 visits in September, Halfway through August I brought a heap more expired domain names and did not realize for a couple of weeks that one of the domain names was a PR3.. so I made a page and linked it to mine And this is what I attribute to the September rise in search results.. my keywords have been climbing up the ranks quite rapidly over the last month and a half and I got to the top ten in 20 different keywords according to Google webmaster tools.. 2,940 visits so far for October. And thats with no search results from MSN or LIVE. (I fell out of there index on the third of October...don't know why) Now here comes the coincidence bit..... I expected my PR3 site to drop to PR0 at the next update, and it did... That was this morning, (Aussie time) I logged on here, There was a lot of chatter about PR updating, So I checked mine, and even commented. I go to work for five hours, and when I get home check out my stats. Well the first observation is, I can't find me on the first page for 90% of my keywords.... not even the second page... for some keywords I have ended up on page ten, Where I was a couple of months ago. So if you were to ask me right now if PR affected SERPs I would have to say.... How the F$#k would I know? I'm just a noob remember! ;-) Cheers James
PR matters in the way it gives your links more valuable. A link from a PR5 page is that much more powerful than a PR3 link, all relevancy being equal.
PageRank is an important ranking factor. Yes, a document with a higher PageRank score will tend to have better rankings for searches related to its content than a document with a lower PageRank score and similar content. But because so many other factors are also involved in how a document will perform in the search results, don't try to use PageRank as a simple shortcut. And it would be more accurate to say 'A link from a PR5 page is that much more powerful than a PR3 link, if the relevance and number of links on the source pages are equal'.
If PR doesn't give factor to the SERP! how can you get a rank 1 in the SERP for a certain keyword that is very competitive!? Though the factor in rankings is link building same as the PR! In PR all you need is a vote!
PR is no connnection to SERP. SERP is like a "main ingredients of your site while PR is a seasoning only"
Brodaiga, Great issue you raise. I have the same doubts. However I will post here what I think the differences may be. Anybody, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong. To me PageRank depends on the number of links & the quality of links pointing at your site. Period. SERPS is more broad. Besides the number & quality of the links it takes into consideration also other factors, such as the anchor texts of those links. PageRanks does not take into consideration the anchor texts, just the PageRanks of the websites linking to a given website. For SERPS, the content of the anchor texts is very important. Besides anchor text, it is very important the content of your page & the architecture of your page (which is not important at all for Page Rank). Therefore, you could have a website with PageRank 5 with no content & it would never appear in the SERPS.
many sites all over the net ranks well in SERP even though their PR is unranked or PR0 or has low PR. I think this is enough reason to prove that SERP has totally no relation with PR regarding the effects.