Hi everyone. I had understood that higher PR = higher rankings. However I have just been searching for some free business advertising on google.co.uk and the top site (out of 11,000,000) has PR1 according to a Page Rank checker I tried. The second site had PR6. Is it therefore not as important when doing SEO as people say or is this just some kind of anomaly? Thanks.
PR is just one factor of weighing the importance of a site. There are other factors such as contents, good keywords, backlinks and many more. It is not advisable to focus on one factor only. As for your example, maybe the PR1 site that you had mention excels in other factors such as fresh contents etc. One of the very important factor also to consider is the selection of keywords. For reference, you can visit http://www.google.com/technology/ for PR info. My two cents worth... ArdRigh
PR is not the same as authority. For me the authority of a domain is the most important SEO factor. It's the quality of the BL that determines the authority of the domain, not just the quantity of them.
Higher PR does not mean you will rank higher for a given search term. In your example, your PR6 site will, in all likelihood, rank higher than the PR1 site for a different term. It just so happens that in your example, the PR1 site has better optimization (probably on page and off) for that specific phrase you searched for. Example, Google.com is PR10, but it won't appear above all other websites for all search terms because Google.com isn't optimized for, let's say, "meatless hamburgers". You are limited in the number of terms you can target on each page. Hope I communicated that clearly...
Hi PR may not necessarily position you at the top. The SE algo for ranking includes a lot of factors including quality backlinks and site structure.
PR gives you some indication of the quality and number of your backlinks which figure into search engine rankings. They arent a direct indication of rankings though because many other factors are involved.
I have also wondered about this. My opinion is that placing a large emphasis on page rank is over rated. People tend to focus on it because it has a numeric value attached, but it's just one piece of the puzzle.