I have a feeling that PR is very much related to content. Let me explain: One niche site, Site A gets X number of good links from PR6 sites with anchor text relevant to that niche. Second general site, Site B gets X links from PR6 sites but all anchor texts are of different topics.. And all pr 6 sites are linking to different pages with different topics. Obviously, site A will get a better PR, because all the inbound links are relevant to the site. Now it it is not Content that gave site A a better PR, then whatelse? *** All else remaining same *** Please clear my doubts!
I'm not sure this is obvious. The site with relevant links should do better in search engine results, but not necessarily in PR.
I suppose, A & B would get roughly the same PR. A would get a much better ranking for that one particular keyword, but B would be found in many more search cases, even if ranking for each KW would be worse than the single most prominent KW in site A. Overall weight of the two sites (=PR) should be tha same. It's up to you to decide, which case you like more. I would say, case B is better for business, because more unexpected customers would find site B, while A only attracts the "standard customers". And who knows - perhaps business with a new customer layer might be much more profitable than the one layer you already expect. One can never be sure... All in all: content is what matters!
Good Question. Yes because, if site A linking to you is related to your site then you will get approximately 80% of the PR of site A. Google is checking your content if they are related to the site linking to you. So content really matters in PR.
No - If site A is linking to you, you get, PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) To put it simply, PR = The PR of the linking pages / outgoing links * the damping factor (which is unknown) The page content is not taken into account anywhere within the calculations.
I seriously think content is closely related to PR these days. To give you an idea, why I am saying it.. consider the following. I linked my real estate site from a dating(PR6) and a mobile phone site(PR6). These were sitewide links. After the PR update, the real estate site retained its original PR. Not happy with this I decided to buy some links from other real estate site, I got 4-5 PR 4+ links to my site and in this current PR update my real estate site went to PR6. So from above, I can infer that PR is closely related to content these days, I am in SEO for last 4 years and therefore I can say that this was not the case 2-3 years back, but now this is certainly what is happening.
You don't say how many outgoing links those pages have, if the dating and mobile phone sites had many other outgoing links from the pages then the effect on PR from those links would be minimal. Also do you have the eaxct dates of when Google took the links into account. As we know toolbar PR exports are backdated by as much as 8-12 weeks, so when your PR didn't raise in the original update it may simply be the case that the link wasn't taken into account in the export. You also don't say what the PR of your site was after the original update. Two PR6 links aren't going to get your page to a PR6 even if they had no other links on the page.
Hi Matt! Perhaps, that damping factor factors in the content .. You see relevance is all about content, isn't it? *********One more example******** Say Site A and Site B are very similar sites. Site A gets X links from all PR6 sites which are relevant.. read similar contents. Site B gets X links from all PR6 sites which are not relevant, read different contents. Which Site will get a better PR, A or B? Don't say that they will have same PR. Now isn't it content?
It will be hard to imagine how google calculate PR if it gives preferance to content. For SERPs definately content plays a major role but calculation of PR, i donnt agree that content has anything to do with the same.
The damping factor relates to the probability that a random visitor will click from the current page to another page and is a constant. It has nothing to do with content. PR is a function of backlinks only.
And link relevance isn't either. So get it out of your system. Only link quantity and linking page PR determine your PR.
Majority of links in those sites were internal links and not outgoing links. On 80% pages there were no outbound links at all. For almost 4 months my site was only running on links from these two sites that means google must have taken into account these links before the PR update. It was PR4. While I can't say for sure whether PR depends on content, but I have a pretty strong feeling it does.
You say the majority, so there were other outgoing links? Sounds about right for two PR6 links to be honest, especially with the other outgoing links from the page. Okay, I'll leave you to that despite all the evidence to the contrary. I'd have thought as an SEO you'd have more of a grasp of basic pagerank functions and the difference between pagerank, topic and semantics.
Everyone who has even spent a little time on the net trying to understand SEO or SERP or PR understands that PR is a "measure of Links".. Kaput. So do I. or rather so did I? That is the definition.... This thread was opened to discuss if it was possible that they consider more than just links. Do they still use the same formula that they developed at Stanford? Haven't they changed the algo a bit to take other factors into account? I am Pagerank crazy. I love Links. So when I see a lesser linked site better ranked, it rankles my mind. And most times such sites are very Topical. At least at PR5 and PR6 levels. Which is why I started to wonder if Content does matter at all.. Please don't repeat the obvious answers...
PR is not directly related to content in my opinion. But PR is however indirectly related to content because the better content you have, the more backlinks you get and your PR will increase.
Correct, PR is a function of the links pointing to your page. Yes, I'm sure the Pagerank algorithm has changed since it was first incorpoatred as part of the ranking algorithm. It's that which you need to concentrate on though, ranking rather than PR. The ranking algorithm has changed drastically over the past few years, with semantics - topic and trustrank becoming even bigger parts of it - one of the reasons why pagerank is no longer as important. I think you're mistakenly thinking that the Pagerank algorithm is the ranking algorithm, which are two completely different things. Who would they incorpoarte trustrank and semantics into the Pagerank algorithm rather than directly into the ranking algorithm? It wouldn't make any sense. Like I said, Pagerank is only a function of links - nothing more nothing less