Does page rank effect google ranking?

PR does NOT effect SERPs. Some of the values that effect PR will ALSO effect SERPs. There is some correlation, but not cause effect.

 

what is the difference between pr and google rank? how to check google rank?

 

This is an old question that still hasn't seen the answer been cleaned up for anyone as yet. I personally think that it depends on your niche, obviously PR is meant to show what respect Google has for your site but that is not always the case as you can draw from the high number of sellers who think that cloning a PR is going to help them rank.

I would focus more on your ranking through related links and fresh, unique content and the PR will come to you in time.

See a link into your site as a vote of confidence, Google see's them like that but are becoming increasingly aware of the spamming on comments so avoid that method.

 

PageRank obviously means a lot to Google, or they would not be investing so much time, money, hardware, and engineers into calculating it.

That's a hint to me not to take PR lightly. I subscribe to the axiom: Follow the money trail.

 

Google uses hundreds of different triggers to decide where to rank site for a given term. Some are on-page, some off-page - and PageRank (Google's measurement of inbound links) is JUST ONE of literally hundreds of things that can effect a websites position in the search engines.

 

And good webmastering would suggest the wisdom of paying attention to any and all factors in ranking, especially when we don't know the weight Google places on each individual element in the ranking. Google's large investment in PR would suggest that it is not just a small fraction of the total algorithm.

 

spamming in comments ? on my blog ? brief a bit more please. thanks

 

Absolutely - I didn't say it shouldn't be thought about as part of the 'mix' - but considering I have seen, and own, several high ranking websites with pr2 to pr 4, yet also own websites that are pr5 and dont rank that well (I do a lot of tests, LoL) I can HONESTLY say that people pay too much attention to pagerank a lot of the time...

It's like anything, it is important to be have a balanced approach to SEO work. I am sure you have great rankings, and find PR is related to rankings - I am just saying that it is one element, and too many people get too blinkered due to the toolbar readings! You seem like a seasoned webmaster, and I dare say you consider lots of things as regards rankings - but lots of newbies here seem to get way to focused on one thing to help with their rankings - and that little toolbar makes it easy for them to do that!

 

Yes, very true, but the issue is still the fact that Google hasn't updated the toolbar PR in many months and some are speculating they will never do it again. These low-PR sites that are outranking high-PR sites aren't really low PR, because their true PR gets updated every day; we just can't see it.

The toolbar PR hasn't been updated in many months, and I can guarantee that many sites have been launched since then, gone on massive SEO and linkbuilding campaigns and earned high SERPS for very competitive keywords. Their toolbar rank will still read 0, but Google knows better and rewards them accordingly.

 

Lots of good answers here; some maybe not so good. None of that changes the fact that, as noted and linked above, Google clearly states that higher PR makes a page more likely to appear higher in the SERPs. Individual, anecdotal cases don't change that. A lot of the lower-PR pages outranking higher-PR pages are because those lower-PR pages have done a better job on other aspects of SEO (other than links which generate the PR), such as well-researched use of keywords in title tags and on-page.

 

Yes, definitely right. I'm guess I'm mainly referring to new sites that have sprung up in the past five months or so. The toolbar PR hasn't been updated since then, but some sites have made big moves on some competitive keywords.

Google is trying to devalue the toolbar PR by telling webmasters to focus on other important metrics (it's in their Webmaster FAQ) and some SEO gurus are predicting that they will never update it again and it will be phased out. Not to say that this is definitely going to happen, but it might.

If it is periodically updated, which up until the last half a year it has, then I'm 100% on board. I'm just not convinced it will remain an accurate snapshot.

 

From the Google FAQ:

The first big step in the devaluing was when they removed it from webmaster tools in 2009 I believe. It seems it's getting less and less important.

 

ROFLMAO PR DOES affect SERPs. PR of your URL IS still a ranking factor... It's just not as imporant a ranking factor as it once was. Back in the day PR was VERY important because Google's algorithm contained only a few dozen signals that were evaluated and the PR of your URL was weighed heavily as a factor. But now days there are 200+ ranking factors. The more factors, the less impact any one factor has. Plus they've likely reduced the weight of PR in their overall algorithm.

But Google's algorithm will likely ALWAYS use PR as a factor. It is after all what made them Google.

Many people think that Google no longer considers PageRank a ranking factor because of a post by Susan Moskwa a couple of years ago when Google removed the page from Google's Webmaster Tools that displayed the number of pages on your site with high, medium, and low PageRank. She said they removed it because it sent conflicting messages since people like Matt Cutts had always said, "Worry about creating good content. Stop focusing on PR." yet Google was showing PR in their own Webmaster Tools. Many people (especially people for whom English is a second language) jumped to the conclusion that "PR was dead."

But removing the page from WMT did NOT mean that they removed PR from their algorithm. The mere fact that it ever existed in WMT to begin with should tell you that it DOES affect rankings. Not only is it a ranking factor (though a very minor one), but it also is used extensively by Google to determine which pages to index from your site.

 

People have to understand that the PageRank which you call it 0 or 1 is the PageRank which the toolbar mentions and it is not actual PR which Google assigns to your site. So you might have got a PR as per the Google index but the Toolbar may not be showing this.
PR influences the depth of pages crawled and it has shown very less correlations to ranking in the past few months.
PR could be a decisive factor for high volume keyword terms like cricket, car insurance and so on. Well it is all my belief.

 

i think high pr is a positive factor.

 

I guessing it still matters. It's probably just one out of hundreds of things that they use to rank your website.

 

For me, any creation has a purpose. I think PR has an effect because in my own experience Site with great PR is always on top than PR0.

 

PR depends on quality of backlinks.
and SERP depends on many factors, one of which is backlinks.
So in short (indirectly saying) SERP also depends on PR.

 

it helps,but it's just one of 100-200 factors

 

Likewise, one could say about earth's atmosphere, "Nitrogen is just one of the 16 gases that make up earth's atmosphere." And you would be correct ... except for the fact that nitrogen makes up 78% of the earth's atmosphere!

Likewise with the 200-some factors making up PageRank. We don't know the percentages each of those is weighted. If I were a betting man, I would wager that PR carries a weight far higher that 1/200.