What makes a PR0 website rank higher in the SERPs compared to a PR5 website? I know this is not always the case but I have a PR5 website competing with another website having PR0 and both websites are aiming for the same target. The PR0 website is higher in the SERPs for the particular key phrase we are both competing against. What could be the factors causing this condition? Appreciate your inputs.
Could be a new site PR0 with better range of content (in the eyes of Google) or better (more authority) links to their site than yours.
Better Content and Links than you, probably older and that usually gives the aforementioned. And yes PR not really rel for SERPs in terms of your site but does yes make links stronger. I have seen sites rank good terms just links from a PR9 Domain. Jay
I had way better backlinks that's why got a PR5. I also checked the other site's backlinks and I would say I had a lot more links than the other one. In terms of content, I can't really say who had the "better" content in google's eyes. My kwd for the key phrase I'm promoting is around 5% which is just about the same as the other. I have also more web pages (if it matters at all).
I agree with this. Also, it may be that the website has more backlinks with the specific keyword as anchor text than the one with the PR5.
For getting PR you don't need links which are related with your site. For SERPs you need related links. Links are related when they come from related sites and when they contain anchor text which is the same or close to the keyword phrase you want to rank with. If you have a sport site and you want to rank for "basketball exercises", 1000 links from music, food, car...sites can bring you high PR but no SERPs for "basketball exercises", (especially if you haven't include this anchor text in your link). Content weights a lot in Google also. Next: a site with PR0 may be in fact only a page from a high PR site. To hear more...show URLs.
Boron is totally correct on that one, get relevant links to rank in sites for a keyword. If you want to rank high for 'widgets in alaska', get your inbound links to contain that text, pagerank is superseeded by the importance of the link.
Oh, I forgot: PR0 and PR5 is what you currently see. You don't know how much both your and your competitor's PR changed from last PR update (April). PR is updating in real time and influences SERPs in real time, but you can see PR change only when it's updated. My mate managed to get PR6 from PR0 within one PR update period...
Link Reputation could be a big part of it. Compare the link text on their incoming links vs. the link text on yours. Also I've found that Google will sometimes give new (PR 0) sites a "honeymoon" period where they will rank them very well on their target keywords (title phrase) only to drop them from the rankings later. I'm not sure why this is... but I've experienced it with my own sites.
WOW, I wish more people understood this. We are all speculating here so it would be more helpful to provide at least the competing sites URL and the targeted keyword. Good luck.
I wish I could give you the keyphrase and the URLs. Unfortunately, that will expose my site. Anyway, I'll try to find another example because I've seen this condition a few times. Anyhow, is this telling us that the weight of PR5 compared to a PR0 website is not a match for the weight given by Google for sites having better quality content? (Again, I'm not even sure now how Google qualifies content as having good quality). What I'm trying to say is, if I have a PR9 website (I wish ) but the content is crap, would it still be out ranked in the SERPs if PR0 website has "very good quality"? Is this "content is king" at it's best? If this is the case, I'd rather concentrate more on "quality content" than on backlinks. This is in contradiction to what some so-called gurus preach. Let me site one... Brad Callen (or Matt Callen...not sure which one) of SEO Elite and Keyword Elite, says that onpage optimization has very minimal effect in terms of ranking high in the SERPs. He says that ranking high in the SERPs rely more...a lot more on offpage optimization...i.e backlinks. I tend to believe that but the problem is it does not explain why PR0 site would rank higher in the SERPs than a PR5 site. This is on the assumption that a site got a PR5 due to relatively good amount of backlinks. As I have said originally, if my site was PR2 or PR3, I would have just ignored the condition where PR0 ranked higher. But for a PR5 being outranked by PR0, I just can't find the explanation.
Ok...here's one example...these are not my sites and I don't have any affiliation with any of them: PR0 : http://www.mysimon.com/9015-10946_8-31100846.html PR5 : http://www.jcpenney.com/products/C09452.jsp The first URL (PR0) ranks higher than the other one with PR5 for the key phrase "top tennis shoes".
Maybe I am unclear on this but what exactly do you think that you are exposing your site to if you give your URL and search term? Let me get this straight. You understand backlinks because you have a PR5 site (right)? So you have placed your link and anchor text in many locations to achieve this rank but when you come to an area to look for help with your rankings, NOW the cat has got your tongue? Do you feel like someone here is going to steal your idea and do it better than you? I think the idea is to drive as much traffic as possible to your site. Isn't that the idea behind your question. We could continue this post for days and speculate on the reasons but if you want real help and specific answers give us the information and we can help. O by the way, do you see the links in the signatures of all the people in this post. I will tell you there is a good chance considering where we are at digitalpoint.com that most of those people probably own those websites and aren't trying to keep them top secret, including myself.
Not exactly BUT... apparently the PR0 site has been doing more seo on that keyword, hence he ranks better in the SERPs for that keyword.
Maybe it was againtst the will of Zeus (King of the Gods) for you to rank higher than your competition.