Just how much weight does PR have for SERP rankings?

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handrewrites

My Member 8=============3
Oct 24, 2010
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Since 2007 I've noticed plenty of individual PR0 pages in top 10 for competitive keywords (and higher PR pages beneath them).

The high PR pages lower in the SERPS are talking about the same thing (and have virtually the same keywords in the titles) as the top 10 PR0 pages.

So, umm, yeah - does PR (from, say, SEOQuake) mean absolute complete fuck all?
 


If you're right, then...
mind-blown-2-500x344.jpg

This is why I gave up on SEO, like, 5 years ago. Viral marketing FTMTW...
 
Well, let me try to elaborate.

In short, no, PR itself means nothing when it comes to ranking.

However, some of the factors that attribute to the PR of a site are shared with factors that are used to rank sites. But there are so many OTHER factors that go into ranking, that PR itself simply can't be used to determine a site's SERP ranking at all.

In other words, if you have a site that's a PR6, it's going to be easier and faster to rank it for whatever you're trying to rank it for than a brand new PR0 or PR N/A site, because you obviously already have some pretty powerful inbound links. But you're still going to need to build new links with your targeted keyword as anchor text and do on-page optimization for that keyword.

If the person with the new PR-less site kicks a bunch of ass at building targeted links with their anchor text and does a pristine job of on-page SEO, they are going to outrank the big dumb high-PR site with a bunch of incoming link juice that it doesn't know what to do with.

Savvy?
 
handrewrites said:
I meant given equal on-page SEO and inbound anchor text.

BTW, hotlinking fail.
Click to expand...

Okay, assuming on-page SEO and inbound anchor text are "equal" (quite an assumption), the presence of the keyword in the domain as well as the age/history of the domain are also big factors that have nothing to do with PR.
 
Correct, PR has nothing to do with SERP's. kingofsp was correct in stating that the PageRank algorithm and the SERP algorithm share several common factors.

The only thing I would add about the relation between them is that you want backlinks from high PR sites. High PR = Higher authority in Google eyes. Since page rank is often based on the quality and volume of the backlinks to that specific site, Google looks at backlinks from those sites as more valuable (as long as it is a legitimate site with low OBL) than a PR0 site. So if you want do well in your SERP's, the way PageRank should be used is simply attempting to get backlinks from those high PR sites in your niche. Outside of that, your own PR is only a reflection of the quality/volume of backlinks you have, but doesn't directly play a role in where you rank.
 
So if I want to gauge the competition for a particular search phrase, rather than looking at the PR of the sites in the SERPS I should instead look at the PR of the sites that link to the sites in the serps (as well as other things like anchor text)?
 
PR is a good initial indicator of how strong their backlinks are. However, I would certainly look at their backlinks too to see what exactly they have been trying to target primarily. Sometimes just because a site is a PR6 and ranking for a keyword you want to rank for, doesn't mean that the backlinks are all pointing to that same keyword. Perhaps their anchor text is spread across tons of different keywords and they so happen to be ranking well for the one you want to target. You can still compete for that one keyword.

However, a PR6 site that has been targeting the keyword you are hoping to rank for might be much harder to dethrone.
 
PR used to be the way Google would rank, when it was a much more basic system, as there were no tools like xrumer. Now though, it means nothing, other than a vague measure of it for people buying links.
 
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