Relax Jim everyone has an opinion and insulting some ones opinion will hardly make your opinion more valid than the person your insulting. What is being pointed out in this thread is merely that too much emphasis is being put on page rank. Most people believe that you can not reach top serps without having high PR. This just isn't true! A good keyword campaign will get you higher in serps and more traffic than having a pr 7. On average all you have to do to get high pr is just have 20 links that have the same or slightly higher pr rank than what you are trying to achieve. To make it simple if you want pr7 get 20 incoming links from pr 7 pages and you will have pr7, so long as you don't get a bunch of low or penalized links as you go. So the question is do you want vanity or traffic?
No doubt about it. That's why a wise webmaster pays attention to all factors that bring success to a website.
Here is a simple way to explain it. A page that uses the keyword rainbow and has a PR8 and has 100 backlinks will still fall way below a site that uses the same keyword and has a PR3 with 300 backlinks using anchored keyword links in the serps. While acheiving PR is pretty easy if you want to just seek out high PR pages to link to it will not help you win in the serps. How do you think smaller sites compete with big brand names? The answer is strong keyword campaigns.
Indeed Jim4767! Couldnt agree more! PageRank is as important as the other parts itself and probably MORE... and those who are complaining (even those with more than 11,000 posts aka backlinks or more or those with 10 posts aka backlinks or less) are suffering from the "sour grapes" syndrome... stone cold truth!
ABSOLUTELY WRONG!!! If you are talking about that... try doing a search for say Computers in Google Inc. and you will see Dell is number 2 on the first page while a more keyword focused site such as Dell Auction is on the 7th on the 64th page... If you are talking about cheap blackhat tactics to get on top.... yes you can... BUT... Google will eventually whack you in the face for it...
Way to make your case! This is the only post so far that actually gives a reason for your point of view and is much appreciated. If we could get more of this and less of the insults that are starting to arrive we may even learn something from this.
Dell computers has 2,178,248 inlinks. Dell auctions has 10,671 inlinks. So explain again who has a more focused keyword campaign? So if Dell auctions wants to surpass Dell computers for the keyword computers they just need to get 2,200,000 backlinks to do so. Actually it would be less but I don't feel like trying to go through the whole weighting system to show how achored keywords are weighted.
Eprofit, I can see from your post count that you are new to this forum. That might explain your not being aware that certain posters here make a constant, unrelenting series of posts saying "PR is useless" without a single well-researched, hard fact to validate their opinion. Some of us get weary of posts full of emotion, but no fact-based content. Stick around a while, and you'll see what I mean.
For me pagerank is important because some advertisers prefer high pagerank and if you are into internet marketing you are so conscious of your pagerank.
PR is not by any means useless and can be a valuable tool depending on your needs. Don't get me wrong I am not suggesting to go out and use blackhat tactics and just rack up your inlinks. I am saying that PR is not the end all be all in serps. In most cases you can build good PR by using a targeted keyword campaign. If when you think of keyword campaigns you think get a million links on spam sites you will find it hard to get to the top of google serps. While I understand that for some sites PR is crucial as twinkles740 pointed out, I would not suggest that you go out and limit your link campaign to PR7 plus sites just to get good PR. Build a quality keyword campaign and it will pay off with lots of free traffic.
pagerank is VERY important ! A site with PR 1 gets in search engine for a keyword in front of one with PR 0 ... I think you got the idea .
My point exactly Jim. I've posted in countless threads by providing links to Google's own public description of PageRank. Some people seem to know more about how Google's technology works then Google itself!
PR is related to the number and quality of your backlinks. Since backlinks DO count, I would suppose a high PageRank is good for SERPs.
If it is not that important, why did Google start it in the first place. My great grandmother told me that sites with no page rank are usually MFA. Peace,
As to the so-called importance Google places on PR: the big trouble is they don't show an accurate value. Any other company that showed a purposely incorrect and outdated value would be laughed out of the marketplace. PR might be important to rankings, but it's the internal, unseen by webmaster PR that matters, not the fool's gold that's being sold to the dupes in the webmaster community.
For example's sake, let's say you had a PR4 page in the last toolbar export, then the same PR4 for that page in the next toolbar export. Just how different from that PR4 do you believe Google's "internal" PR varies from the toolbar PR4 in between exports? Considering what most believe is the logarithmic calculation of PR values, the difference in that case between the "internal" PR and the toolbar PR is very small, if any. The posts about "real", internal PR being different from toolbar PR are correct IF there is an increase or decrease in toolbar PR from one export to the next. But internal and toolbar PR are virtually identical between toolbar exports for a page with the same toolbar number in consecutive exports.