Google Page ranking

[amina]

I agree that we are all working for better SERPs and not for PR. But PR for me is also a part of our worthwhile work in optimizing a site. For me, PR is an award for your site.

[ahsan]

you are right amina ! i think so

[ahsan]

This is SEO myth some believes on this is Status symbol.
But PR nothing to play on your queries/ business I have worked on many of websites which have low PR even 0 PR but getting good business........

I remember one of my client got PR4 i informed him but didn't know to install Google tool bar even didn't know about PR. No. of people didn't know about PR but they know about business search.......

[ahsan]

This is SEO myth some believes on this is Status symbol.
But PR nothing to play on your queries/ business I have worked on many of websites which have low PR even 0 PR but getting good business........

I remember one of my client got PR4 i informed him but didn't know to install Google tool bar even didn't know about PR. No. of people didn't know about PR but they know about business search.......

[amina]

hehehe .. i was also believing in this that the PR is not so important but now i have changed my mind about PR!

[amina]

In many market niches I have seen the opposite as well - younger sites, with lower PR and even less links outrank older, higher PR sites with hundreds of thousands of links. There are a lot of factors that are taken into consideration by the ranking algo - the quality of the links and them being topically related is sometimes more important than PR by itself.

[ahsan]

not exacly...

When U have higher PR, you can get more idexed sites and U can get more backlinks

[amina]

Honestly, I really don't mind about having a PR because I focus a lot more on SERP and Traffic...

[ahsan]

How's that then?

Presumably you mean "more indexed pages"? You don't need high PR for that, you just need a good spread of deep backlinks.

And what's this "and U can get more backlinks"?
You mean exchanged links? They suck (compared to one-way links). So - apart from link exchanges - how does having higher PR help you to get more backlinks?

[amina]

What a site owner wants is to place high in the SERPs for appropriate search terms. Now think about it: if you were designing a SE algorithm to rank sites for a given search term, what would you look at?

PR is a meaure of how many other pages on the web have "voted for" your pages by linking to them; if you're a SE, you will count those votes, but you will also weight each one by how important you think each site casting a "vote" is. That, in turn, means more than just the PR of the linking site--it also means the degree to which that site is related to its link target. If you're Google and deciding on the importance of incoming links to--let's say--a page on cocker spaniels, which will seem more significant to you in judging the merit of the page: a link from a PR5 page on dogs or a link from a PR5 page on plumbing?

But that's just a beginning. If your page on cocker spaniels has a paragraph discussing (perhaps for purposes of contrast) Siamese cats, a SE may well list your page somewhere in the results for searches on Siamese cats--but it will be far lower there than on searches for cocker spaniels.

The point is that your SERPs depend very, very strongly on the particular search phrase--which is to say the target keywords--involved. That is why pages with rather low PR can often come up high in SERPs: there simply isn't much competition under the keywords in question. Consider two web pages, each of the same length and approximate depth and SEO'ed page layout, and each with the same number of incoming links with the same PR; one page is about the author J. R. R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and the other is about the author Hope Mirrlees (Lud-in-the-Mist). Do a search for each of those wuthors, and guess where in the SERPs each page will end up. A page on the famous Tolkien that ends up in the top 100 is doing fairly well; a page on the obscure Mirrlees--with, remember, the same incoming PR--that doesn't end up in the top 10 has done something seriously wrong.

In short, it's a race. If your competition is an Olympic-class miler, you'd better plan on being able to run really fast; if it's an out-of-shape octogenarian, you have a good chance to win by just walking fast.