I am trying to improve understanding to know what google thinks about a website, e.g. the "trust" google places on a given website or url. PR is no longer a good indicator, although clearly if you have pr8 or 9, then google likes you But a pr2, 3 or 4 seem very poor indicators and these change a lot with each google pr export (to toolbar). So I am trying to gauge other indicators. One I have been looking at is the backlinks shown from the google toolbar, is this a better indicator of the respect google has for a website or url? I have seen some extreme examples, in some cases websites with low pr, but 100+ backlinks in the toolbar, and ranking high on competitive keywords.. Any thoughts on this? Is the number of backlinks shown on the toolbar a good indicator to gauge a website's "google trust", or is this just another way google tries to confuse those specialising in seo techniques to improve serps?
PR has to do with the "quality" of the links back to a page based on keywords and anchor texts. The higher the PR of a page for a particular keyword the greater its authority. The more high authority backlinks you get for keywords you rank for, the higher your PR etc. So the algorithms no longer just look at PR alone but also the relevancy of the pages linking back to the keywords of the page. So for example if your page has keywords for "scuba diving" and the backlinks you have are all PR 8 and 9 but are have keywords for "motor cars" it's of no use to you at all. I hope this helps.
Google's Tool Bar just shows mis-matched data. You can only bring Google Trust with.. 1>> Great Content on your pages written to help your visitors (not for Bots). 2>> Build some backlinks. 3>> Do social media marketing. 4>> Do Comment postings. Follow your industry's expertz, and repeat what they do. thanks, J