I hate to say it, but from another thread I am left confused. I thought PR or PageRank was related to in what order the sites, that get found when performing a search on Google, appear in the search engine results. Can someone help clarify this?
If you are trying to build a link building campaign, most other web masters would like to get links from sites with higher PR. There's a myth that people think PR really matters in the SERPs. I've got a page that ranks in the top 20 with a PR 2 for a VERY competitive keyword. Another reason to have a high PR is for the Co-op network. The reason behind this is because the maximum weight you are allowed to have is based on your PR + Indexed Pages. This was to prevent extremely large sites from over powering the network and getting more links because they were huge (many forums pages will take out the little guys who don't have forums to over inflate their indexed page count).
The pagerank (calculated from backlinks) could be one of the many aspects of the Google algorithm. Only Google knows the factors it uses. Shannon
One thing I can think of is that it does give you an idea how many people or maybe a percentage of how many people on the web are linking to you and how much visibility you are getting, but I was under the impression, partly because the term was coined by google that it was a factor in the display alorythm. So I guess some people think so, some do not. Well at least we know it is a good thing.
There are a lot of threads here on Digital Point, just search on the keywords " PR SERP Position" and you will find them all
PR is a factor in the big picture of how sites are indexed but not the only factor. See this thread here at DP and you will see what Compar says about all this http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1186&page=3&pp=40 Have fun
Google has indicated that PR is "one of more than 100 factors determining Google ranking", which would suggest that it does matter -- I would agree that it doesn't matter quite as much as some people appear to believe.
I've never seen any site with a pR10. Does anyone know of one? I'd like to visit them and see what it is that made them PR10.
I can tell you without going there. There's only one answer. Links! They have a boatload of links. Off the top of my head (are/were PR10): Google, Microsoft, Abobe reader download page, flash plugin download page, a nasa site. Found the list: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/archive/index.php/t-760.html
It is confusing mainly because PR is often used to mean one of at least three different things. Firstly there is the Toolbar PR which is simply a graphic of the integers 0 - 10. Secondly there is the RAW PR which is defined in the original paper by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Thirdly there is the Modified PR which Google use as a component in their ranking algorithm. When you read that "PR doesn't matter" or something similar it is probably referring to Toolbar PR or RAW PR. Modified PR clearly does matter but it is the one about which we know least. The Google News (GN) algorithm is a query dependent algorithm and does not make any PR calculations instead using term vectors and topic vectors. It is quite probable that the Modified PR in the ranking algorithm is now calculated using elements from the GN algorithm. - Michael
I just asked the same question the other day because I have low PR but rank highly. I like the answer I got; It goes something like this: A lower PR page may show up higher for a certain KW because it is optimized better for that keyword or combination, i.e. a PR6 page may have low KW density. When all things are identical, PR becomes a factor in heirarchy and will rank accordingly. That makes sense to me. It also emphasizes having good clean KW rich code and text which anyone can do. (I exclude myself from that statement)
Fantastic post Michael, this has been something that most folks do not understand, they figure that "High PR = High SERP position". How much of a factor is the key here and that is what folks have a hard time understanding. Many experts have mentioned that Page Rank is dead as a future technology, but it is such a large part of the Google marketing and MIS machine that they "have" to keep it around because of it's success. Even Yahoo came out with "web rank" to attempt to compete (what happened to that)
I was referring to overall toolbar PR that doesn't matter since it's normally out of date by the time we see it.