PageRank Scaled Up

Remember the Google update (last one?) of PageRank or was it the one before.

Anyway, lots of sites slipped back a point on the toolbar pagerank scale. It became a lot harder than it was to get a PR5 and even harder than it was to get a PR6 etc.

It makes sense to me that scaling pagerank up, would dilute the link building efforts of many webmasters. Good for google search results from google's point of view.

Lately I have read a lot of talk in forums that pagerank is much less of a factor these days and it has little effect on serps... and so on.

I don't believe this is the case, if anything the harder it is to get the darn stuff, the more powerful it is when you do get it.

 

How many PR 0 sites do you see in the Number 1 position of searches?



There is your answer.

 

None. If there is any at #1 then next update their pagerank would be revealed.

What is your point?

 

There are few low PR sites high in the SERPS as by definition these sites would have few links. PR is not much of a factor but the links that lead to PR are.

Also the more pages that Google has in it's index then the harder it is to reach a higher PR, in the recent update google doubled the number of pages which is why lots of sites dropped and it's now harder to fill the little green bar!

 

MattUK=PR is not much of a factor but the links that lead to PR are.

That is the kind of wording I've been hearing. So can you break that comment down for me and explain in more detail what you are saying.

 

Dominic,

I think you might be partly correct. Our sites dropped from PR5 to PR4 a few months ago, but ranking has stayed high. It seems like nothing is moving up for them either. I figured we would have PR5 back again since we have more backlinks from higher PR sites now then before.

 

They are not scaling anything up. It's the number of websites competing that is... The more pages they index the harder it is to move up. It's a scale that is constant between 0 and 10 measuring a growing number of pages. So with this increased compition brings more difficulty to achieve the higher ranks...

As far as pr not being a factor, I believe it is the most important factor... When I say this, I'm not talking about toolbar pr.. this could be something that was designed to throw us SEO's off. I'm talking about the internal pr that make the basis for their search engine. That is why a search for a keyword on a low pr site that often times you will see linking sites come up well before you..... And all the linking sites have is PR and the only mentioning of your link. That is why I believe that internal PR is of utmost importantance...

I have created many sites and have them rise... One thing that was always constant is first few months of my site creation, my link partners that were of high pr (PR 7 and 8) came up well before me... And often times number 1 above pages dedicated to the keyword. All they have to do is sneeze the keyword on the page (one mention) and be listed in top 5 positions.

 

I saw the same thing when I was sandboxed, high pr sites link to me and get ranked higher because I use a semantically optimized description. But I think the problem was more with our site being sandboxed. Perhaps your was too at the time.

 

My point is that if PR didnt have any impact on the serps, you would see PR 0 sites ranking high.

 

I believe that the most important factor at the moment for Google is IBLs with good anchor text that is varied and and looks natural, i.e from a range of sites without all of the anchor text being exactly the same. I don't think the PR of a site is much of a factor at all
- however -
because sites rank well that have lots of incoming links they also have high PR, why? Beacuse inbound links generally result in a higher pagerank. PR is almost like a side effect or a good SERP rank, not the reason for it.

 

Hey, not bad for your 4th post!! I totally agree with this. PR is still very important in SERPs and the fact that some sites have dropped a notch simply means that there the sites that define the PR10 are showing more BLs than ever before. This raises the bar and affects everyone else.

Joey: The toolbar PR is different from the PR used for calculating SERPs. PR0 sites can get to the top for non-competitive terms but if you see them at the top for a competitive term, it simply means that the toolbar PR hasn't been updated but the real PR has.

And guys, don't worry too much about what the toolbar says. Although it is nice to have a lot of green showing for your sites. Because at the end of the day, all you need to do is have a high enough PR to beat your competition in the rankings. Depending on your industry, the PR needed to achieve this could be as low as PR3 or as high as PR7 (or higher).

Having said that, it is easier to exchange links if you have a high PR showing on the toolbar. I would personally like to be at least a PR5, but if I had to choose I would choose high rankings over a high toolbar PR any day!

 

I know that inbound link text is important but has anyone given any serious consideration as to how much of an influence the theme of the linking page has. This accounts for a lot in my opinion. This is why a lot of lower PR sites rank above higher PR sites. If for example I had a website about XML, it would be a lot more powerful to get a link from a PR 4 page about XML then to get a link from a PR 5 page about Granny Bunty's Cake Recipes.

Anyone in agreement here?

 

Theme of a page (not site) helps.

Some page's theme is 'links' they use 'links' in the title, anchor text to the page etc, what a waste.

But the impact of PR I've noticed on our sites is:
...the higher the pagerank
...the fewer the links on the page
...the greater the impact on serps is
...for the anchor text they link to you with

e.g. I got an inbound link to an internal page from a PR7 with 20 links (internal+external=20). I only link to this page from one pr4 page within our site and it is the indented result next to our homepage in the top ten results for a 9 million result one word search. So I'm thinking it's a pretty strong 7.

The only way to further improve an already good situation like this would be if the great majority of links to their page also contained the word or phrase you are after as anchor text and the other on page elements like title contained our keyword also.

 

Some food for thought....

From my experience, I've personally seen PR0 sites score very high on SERPs. I've helped a friend of mine setup his site and am seeing incredible SERPs results in the big three (G,Y and MSN). In this scenario, I think the number of competiting sites, allin text, and number of IBLs for the KWs plays an important role and that is why he is achieving the results. I have also seen another site of another friend of mine maintain his high SERPs for over two years in a very competitive industry WITH NO TWEAKING of the site what so ever. The key on that site is one-way 'theme related" in-bound links. (he only has only one out-bound link and the IBLs are nothing special PR1-4)

cheers
Frank

 

Hey dfsweb not bad for your 330th post!
I totally agree with you, word by word. Also guys rich content and relevant targeted keyword with your site content is so important factor to get rank higher at SERPS.
At the end of the day, we all optimizing our sites to rank higher at the SERPs and to drive traffic our sites.
If you'd have rich content, you'll be amazed, how different referrals you'll get via SEs.

 

Do you have any examples of sites that are high in the SERPS with PR0, I'd be interested to see them.

 

Hey MattUk,

Sure no problem.

Background: My buddy is a smokeless tobacco chewer. According to him, this smokeless tobacco is called "snuff". He invented a holder to prevent the wear on cowboy's back pockets.

Here is the info you need.
site: www.snuffcaddy.com
keyphrase1: snuff can holders(msn:1,G:1,Y:1)
keyphrase2: snuff caddy (msn1,G:3,Y:1)
keyphrase3: snuff (msn:1,G:14,Y:n/a)
keyphrase4: snuff holders (msn:1,G:1,Y:1)

cheers
Frank

 

That's an interesting example. I would however like to remind you that there was a PR update a month ago and for all you know, your friend's site might not be a PR0 anymore. The toolbar should also be updated soon (one of these days) and you should be able to see a new (non-zero) PR value for your friend's site when this happens; as the toolbar hasn't been updated for around 3 months now so the PR0 that you see is quite out of date.

 

Those keywords are hardly competitive... I would say that you would hard pressed to rank for anything really competitve with a PR 0.

 

Exactly!

People who think high PR helps you rank high, think of it this way.

Adobe's reader download page has a huge PR because there are gazillion of links out there to it (all with 'click here' to download or 'Acrobat Reader' as the anchor text).

When you say high PR helps ranking you haven't even mentioned Keywords yet! Ranking TOTALLY depends on the Key phrase and this has NOTHING to do with the PR of the site that might be pulled out of the index and put into the SERP.

Adobe ranks high for 'click here' and 'adobe reader' because of all these links with the correct anchor text! Again... Anchor Text is the key. Not PR. See all those co-op success stories for evidence.

Adobe's high PR doesn't help them for ranking at all if you don't mention the search phrase yet. There are millions of PR 0-4 pages that outrank Adobe's high PR reader download page. Because it has to do with the IBLs' anchor text, not the PR. SERPs and Search Phrases go hand in hand. Not SERPs and PR.

IBLs and the anchor text of them in particular are THE #1 factor for ranking (at this very moment in time) as we see over and over again. Again, for evidence, see the co-op and all those googlebombing examples.

The White House doesn't rank #1 for miserable failure because of its PR.

1) It ranks #1 for that phrase because of the many IBLs with this anchor text.
9999) It might well have a high PR because these links don't just tell Google what the target page might be about; their decent PR is because in the end, these links will pass PR as well.

So you can safely say that ranking has nothing directly to do with PR. And: PR does definitely not determine the results order or your ranking.

As Matt says, you will indeed often find that high ranking pages have high PR. But DON'T turn this around and say that this is because of their high PR*. It is ONLY because of the fact that if it's a competitive phrase, they needed a lot of links with the right anchor text to get to the #1. Subsequently they got PR passed form these links. This is how links gave them high PR. This is NOT how PR gave them high ranking.

I'm not saying the PR value of the page in question isn't factored in at all; I don't know the algorithm. But it is crystal clear to me that it's the backlinks and their anchor text which are FAR MORE important for your ranking than this PR value.

How can MSN and Yahoo have decent Search Engine's and good results if they don't have PR? Because the links, their anchor text, the themes, on page content and a few other variables are more than enough.

So how is PR used then? Or is it useless? I think they use PR to map a sort of sociologic map of the web. By means of PR calculations and representation you can get a graphical view, a web of the interaction between sites based on links. Similar to how you can have geographical/spatial data represented with GIS in 2 or 3 d maps. By running analysis of the linking behaviour (PR as a result of that analysis) you can get all sorts of interesting data like autocorrelation, topology of the web and its nodes and so forth. You can overlay this data by means of multivariate mapping of the spatial distribution of data and with this Google knows how to optimize it's network, how to geographically make results more relevant etcetera.

Google's goal is organising the web. Search is just part of it. With PR and geographical locations of data they can find out how to organise this 'chaos'. By analyzing linking structures, just like your routefinder navigation system does, they can find shortest paths, social networks, optimum distribution of their networks etc. By knowing PR and studying this sort of behaviour (data transfer, traffic movement, clustering of sites) they can predict how to best use their systems. Similar to how traceroutes work.

If this doesn't mean anything to you then check out these links:

http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/routes.html
http://www.cybergeography.org/maps/maps26.html
http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_016/

This site http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_017/ shows a part of the www indexed by geography. Now they've taken the geographical location but they could have used PR. i.e. sites with tons of links between each other close to each other. High PR sites will have many 'roads' (links) running towards them. This can help a lot in understanding the web and that's what Google tries to do. Understand it first, then organise it.

A very good example of mapping the web (on a small cale) to visualize processes and interaction in order to get a better understanding of it all is Flickr's project discussed here:

http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000197033820

Read up on GIS and networking to see what I'm on about.

Again, I'm not saying this is how it is, this is just how I would use the otherwise useless PR values of pages.

* (Silly but easier-to-understand example...) If every time you see your girlfriend in a sexy outfit in front of you you get a boner... DON'T think that everytime you get a boner your girlfiend will magically appear in front of you in a sexy outfit. It Doesn't Work Like That (Unfortunately! )

See you tomorrow!

PS I hate it when after so much effort I still haven't said it exactly the way I want it. It's a weird subject PR! It's almost the ccicken and the egg issue. But IBLs come first, then PR. You need to understand what causes what.