Firstly, my mission is to increase my search engine ranking on Google for a specific keyword. I was always under the impression that backlinks which I get from higher PR-ranked sites would definitely improve my rankings over backlinks from a site with no or very low PR (let's just assume both types of sites have related content to my site). Am I right? I just read an article below which seems to dismiss this: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/06/30/steps-to-increase-your-google-page-rank Thanks again guys.
Non-sense, first off related website backlinks benefit Pagerank AND search engine results, so that should be your main source of backlinks if attainable, relevancy is a big issue when it comes to SERPs. Second, if you provide rich unique content you'll build backlinks naturally because people will actually want to link to you. Seriously, who links to useless or irrelevant content for their web visitors?
That article is outdated (2004? may as well be 1994!) and contains several pieces of misinformation. From the available information Google has provided about the pagerank algorithm, this article is untrue particularly in the quoted material. PR is not merely a quantitative estimation of backlinks; it is a dynamic equation based on the PR and outgoing links of the backlinking pages. The advice is good-don't chase high PR only-but not for the reasons MR. Nixon suggests. Low PR sites still contribute to your SERPs and PR...just not as much. However, these pages may very well grow...and you will have already placed your link before the real estate gets hard to camp on. That line, "Google simply counts backlinks" is either an outright lie to dissuade link competition, or this individual is confused about SEO. When claculating PR, the PR of the linking sites is obviously part of the formula, or the whole thing would be utterly meaningless. The top sites would all have millions of crappy FFA links and real sites that don't spam would never get any PR. PR is an estimation of the likelihood that google will index a page, and, therefore, links on a page. So a high PR link will be crawled again and again, whereas a PR 0 link may not get indexed at all.
Well, gaining high PR backlinks can help your site not only in SERP but also in PR. But it's not the PR that counts in all time. Backlinks also from relevant sites are also a great factor of your SERP ranking.
Thanks. SERP results is my main target though. I'm trying to aggressively target a certain keyword phrase, I guess I don't care as much about PR, but I'm sure PR will only help me in raising my SERP. You say relevancy is a big issue when it comes to SERP. A highly relevant page which has a PR5 would be heaps better than a highly relevant page which has a PR1, correct? Or is the difference minimal? I always thought it would be a big difference. Thanks!!
I have found that having the anchor text for the keyword you are trying to target is a little more important than a sites page rank. I was ranking around 11-13 for a pretty compettive keyword phrase. I rearranged some of my anchor text on a few sites that I communicate with the owners and went to 4-6 in a few weeks.