Former Google Employee Admits PR means NOTHING

PR indeed has nothing to do with search engine rankings or traffic however due to the fake hype us webmasters created ourselves, there tends to be a mood which favours high PR when you are selling/buying sites or exchanging links etc.

 

I'm a contributor to other forums and a lurker here, but I registered just to respond to this thread. Boron and Manchesterguy have it right. The notion that PR means nothing is ridiculous and the OP is misinterpreting the value of PR.

Does high PR correlate directly to high rankings? Absolutely not. We see examples all the time of low or no PR sites outranking sites with high PR, but to dismiss PR as meaningless just dumb.

Give me a site with a PR10 page and let me compete against a site where the highest PR page is a PR1. Who do you think will get more traffic and pages indexed in a month? How fast do you think new pages added to each of these sites will show up in the index? PR means NOTHING? Give me a break.

If there were as many working pros here as there are theorists, this wouldn't even be a topic of discussion.

 

I agree 100% Pr means nothing but sites with higher pr do get indexed more often, Also google wants people to use them for text link not the small fries so its about instilling fear in webmasters so advertisers spend money with google not with Jo blow. But while PR means nothing I will gladly take any PR6-PR10's off anyones hands...thanks

 

there's a reason why he is a former employee not a current. lol

 

PR is one of the factors in SERPs. When peple see that PR0 site is higher than PR4 site in SERPs, they say PR is nothing. Low PR is weak ranking factor, so many other factors (internal linking, appropriate use and placement of keywords...) can override it. Most of people had never get PR7 or PR8 backlinks, so they don't know the power of high PR.

Next myth is "quality" or "relevance" of the backlink. You can get totaly irrelevant backlink from low quality site (from the users viewpoint), with high PR as the sole value, and it will help a lot in SERPs. I'm not saying this is OK, but this is how things work at the moment.

 

How could she reveal that? don't they sign up NDA?

 

Great post here...

I also always believed that PR was only related to links and not to traffic...good to know it now from an ex Google employee

 

Hi All,

PR shown in Google Toolbar is very much differrent from the real PR which is used by google internally to rank pages.

Its called TrustRank

Focus on building quality content and links from related sites. Your visible PR will naturally increase

 

Love this
so true!

Sure, pagerank means nothing to the SERPS but when you are building links and trying to get link exchanges, etc. it matters A LOT. It can be difficult to get good links with no page rank.

 

there's a lot of people that make money off the fact that they have a high PR, they'd hate to hear this type of news
All in all, PR relevancy depends on what one is talking about, SERP? Link Exchanges?

 

Anyone that pays any attention to SEO has known for years that Pagerank and SERPS position aren't directly linked.

 

Anyone that pays any attention to SEO has known for years that high Pagerank and SERPS position are directly linked.

 

Well, that's true, PR means everything and also means nothing.
Dont rely on Google to give you traffic by all means.

 

Really, do you have any evidence to back that up?
Google have a PR10 site, why don't they rank for everything? Why don't they even rank for search engine?

 

Your response is a good explainory item. People really confuse themselves on the PR factor and doesnt understand for what they are really meant for

 

I've provided evidence, just go through the thread. It's you who didn't provide any evidence for your claim. If you do, I might consider my statement. I'm not the fan of this PR influence, but I think that it exists at the moment, and that it might be changed in the future.

I don't see the reason, why Google should rank for search engine, while you are already there when you're searching. If they wanted to, they could stick Google.com for everything.

Zedomax (above) just said: PR means everything and it means nothing.
Of course you won't rank for keywords, if you don't have them on the site and if you didn't optimize the site for those keywords. A site can't rank for "everything".

High PR backlink with a keyword in anchoer text can boost your site a lot if you have content related to that keyword on a site. Beside PR, other ranking factors have to be considered.

 

LOL, one day you'll learn

You seem to be confusing Pagerank for authority and trust factors. Pagerank is just a metric that is derived from links.

 

As you've said, PR is metric of links. Links are factor in SERPS, this is the same as saying: PR influence SERPs. Not all links and not only PR, of course.

 

PR is a minimal factor - as I said it's just a metric of links.

You're making the mistake of thinking that when you get a link from a high PR site that it's the PR that influences any change in the SERPS.

In fact you're mistaking cause and effect. High PR sites almost always tend to have a high degree of trust and authority and its this that is far more influential than PR.

In theory I could have a PR8/9 site inside 3-6 months by buying high value PR links. This site in itself won't rank well or it's link influence others to rank well as despite having a high PR it isn't aged and doesn't have any authority.

Therefore, claiming,

Is wrong as you're focusing on a metric rather than the factors behind that metric.

 

PR is a good guess of 'factors behind that metric'. This is all the trick. Just like you've said: high PR site almost always tends to have a high degree of trust...It is not necessary that things match mathematically, but when you get a high PR link, it is a great chance you'll move in SERPs a lot. The point is, that you can check PR, and you can't check 'factors behind'.