After reading a few posts on the forum, i'm left confused! I thought we need a high PR to rank well in search engines. To me, if somebody does a search on Google for the terms "cheap mobile phones", a site with a PR of 7 would be listed higher up in the search results than a site with a PR of 2 (if both are competing for the same terms - ie they both have relevant content for mobile phones). But some ppl say that PR does not affect your ranking in seach results? So why the hell do we need a high PR? Can somebody explain?
You need lots of high quality links (any good content) to get good rankings. In general PR is a measure of how many links you have. So a PR6 site has more quality links than a PR5 site. PR is just an indicator of the general number of links your site has and doesn't mean anything in itself. People like to see PR as it shows the site is not banned and has at least a few links pointing at it.
From my experience, people are mostly addicted to that darn little green stripe they see in their Firefox or IE toolbars Toolbar PR is pretty useless, and is not a reliable source of info, since its updates are too far between. If your page has a higher PR than your competitor's, ceteris paribus, your page will be crawled more often. Also, be sure to have a high PR if you plan to trade links In all other cases, PR doesn't mean much. It's one of the many, many ranking factors, and I guess the only one Google officially acknowledged of using -- that's why people are obsessed with it Seriously though, it won't guarantee you traffic or sales. High quality links will. Warkot
Like Warkot said above... PR is useless unless you plan on selling links on your website. If your new to SEO and just starting your website just completely FORGET about the little green bar That would be your best bet.
As mad4 said, pr is a link metric. Nothing more, nothing less. It's like a shortcut to seeing relatively how many "quality" links that you have. The only reason PR has a percieved effect is that it measures links which can have a huge effect on your ranking, so while people think that PR is important, it really just boils down to links, nothing more, nothing less.
Does a toolbar PR value really guarantee a site is not banned? I've seen a site which Google stopped indexing, it was not in its cache, but surely the green stripe was still green, not grey. I'm not sure there actually is a 100% reliable way to tell a banned site. What do you guys think? Warkot
You alreayd answered your own question. Do that search again. If you see PR2s outranking PR4s 5s and 6s then there's your answer.
Toolbar PR is updated periodicly so maybe there is a need to wait for next toolbar PR update to become grey. I haven't heard of any site which went to gray in the time between two updates, has anybody?
You are quite right - just because a site has PR doesn't mean its not banned. If the site has been indexed but isn't indexed any more then its banned. Do a site:www.site.com search to check.
You will also notice as you research your niche competition that often lower PR sites rank above sites with higher PRs in search results. This is because PR is just one factor taken into consideration in ranking the results. From what I have seen, anchor text does indeed play a major role in determining where your site will rank in the search results. If you have the search terms in both your anchor text and meta title, then you stand a good chance of outranking higher PR pages. Of course site age also comes into play. Thanks to all the spammers, new sites are clearly looked upon with suspicion. But once you've been around a while (6 months? A year?), your link building and attention to anchor text should pay off.
Not always. Google even has no explanation for that. I have see several websites with very few outbound links achieve high PR while many other website with high quality links decrease PR.
Yeah, good point, checking index and cache is a better way then relying on PR. Another question: How long does it take with Google to unban a site? Will an unbanned site start from scratch in Google or will it regain the link pop and PageRank as before? I saw a site that Google stopped indexing, with PR 6. Of course, the PR was still green when this happened, and remained green after Google started to index it again (after a month or two). The site also regained its rankings very quickly. I wonder if it's normal and what would've happened if there'd been a toolbar PR update when the site was out of the index? Would it make any difference to the rankings after the site showed up in Google again? Warkot
PR doesnt have a use, it signifies the amount of links you have pointing to your website. More Links= More PR= Better Rankings Therefore PR also helps when selling the site IT
Google ranks pages based upon a search phrase, they she stacks the sites mainly based upon page rank. One problem is if you have crappy SEO you wont get there in the first place or you may get listed on page two or three. Just having a high pr does not mean you will get to the top, your optimization has to be up to standards and work together with the page rank...
Thanks everyone for shedding some light on this matter. I've seen too many ppl obsessed with PR so i was confused, but now i know better
Actually not to contradict but Pr isn't just links as it also reads the quality of your website(popups, how much content) and history as well. For example an order website will receive higher PR since it is seen as reliable. Thank You
All things being equal, high PR ranks better than a lower PR because it's a measure of authority. Generally, this applies to Google only, but more recently Yahoo! has been observed to rank sites with authority better than the rest. When one finds a low PR website ranking better than a higher PR one in the same niche, it becomes all too easy to deduce that PR doesn't matter, but that lower PR page ranked better because it was deemed more relevant in some way that is hard for us to see without any real research and analysis. PR is good for SERPS, and like mentioned above, it's good for link selling and whole bunch of other things. PR definitely matters, however, it's only ONE factor out of possibly hundreds that determine a website's ranking.
In my quest to better understand PR, i came across this site (let me correct this, it's Google's own site) which talks about PR. Here's an extract: And here's the link: http://www.google.com/technology/ This clearly says PR plays a major role in search results, doesnt it?