Hey, In light of the increasing difficulty in getting a high PR, and in regard to link reputation, is PageRank really that important anymore? What are the benefits of having a high PR? Better rankings? Thanks.
I think it is a combination of better rankings and more frequent and deeper crawling though lots of other factors also affect these two as you know.. PR is just one of many factors. I think it is a good indication of the strength and potential effect of an inbound link.. if a new link to your site is a PR1 or PR2 then it's not going to help you as much as a PR6 or PR7 link.. this will likely be true in both Yahoo and MSN although they do not use PageRank directly as well as Google. For instance, when exchanging links with a site, don't give out PR7 links in exchange for PR0 or PR1 links as the other person is getting the much better side of the bargain. Eric
Page Rank is a factor in SERPs however a really small factor. Page Rank is just a calculation per page of inbound links verses outbound links. Sites that have many in bound links are spidered faster, because the spiders follow links. Hence a higher PR gets cached faster. In regards to the algorithm for Serps, PR factor doesn't take into account Keyword anchor links, just links in general. We should all know that Keyword anchor in bound links are a top priority ( including on site optimization) for reaching higher SERP. Sites with a High PR many times don't out rank in SERPS when compared to sites that have good on page optimization and in bound anchor links for certain keywords. It's all about Keyword density and inbound anchor keyword text. The PR of a site should only be considered a Rating of how many links are targeted to that site, but doesn't tell us that those links are Keyword anchor text links ( for certain keywords). A site could have 5000 links and a decent PR 5-6-7 but without keyword anchor links they could suffer for secondary keywords or even major keywords if another site has a better allintitle, allinachor, allintext and allinurl factors and a lower Page rank. This lower PR site will actually have a Better SERP. tip- You can see this for many keywords, just use mcdar.net and pick a keyword term and see what is ranking higher, many times the higher PR is not the top positions in Serps for that keyword. Using Mcdar's allin factors gives you a better indication of a sites SERP factors.
PR is not important for good SERPs, but links with a good and on-topic anchor text are and those increase your PR as well. Even a PR10 page could do horrible in the SERPs if for example all incoming links having a totally random combination of numbers as anchor text.
PR = an indicator (a scale from 1 to 10) of how important your website is. IBLs = an indicator of the number of websites that link to you. Anchored IBL's help you rank higher. PR is formed out of IBL's. Thus PR is somewhere involved in a website rankings.
Well, some people says it's not really important, but PR does however bring you more exposures to your website, and in the case of bussiness websites, then thats is really important.
if you have achieved a certain pr, ie 5+, do you still need new backlinks (with anchored keywords) to increase your SERPs? ie do you need a separate # of BL for either PR or SERPs?
Personally I think the biggest benefit of having a higher PR website is that link partners will actively be chasing your site out. You dont have to worry about finding link partners anymore, because they are finding you. Also it gives you a good site to launch new sites from, A high PR site will help any new sites get crawled and indexed very quickly by placing a link to the new site, from the high PR site. As for SERPS, well PR doesnt really give much of an indication on how well you will rank. As mentioned above, that depends on your sites IBL's and the anchor text that is being used in the backlinks. Don't forget that links will age, and pass on more PR value as they get older. In a way SERPS and PR are related, because you may be building backlinks with proper anchor text to rank well. And as a result you will get PR value from each of those links.
All ranking factors are important including PageRank. Don't focus on one of them but all of them. Just a brief list: - on-page optimization - lots of content - general link building - keyword rich link building - frequent updates and adding new content frequently (don't let your site become stale) etc. Focus on all aspects of ranking, not just PageRank. It will take care of itself in the long run. If it were just PageRank, you would just need to buy a few high PR links.