Is a 0/10 PR better than not being ranked at all?

[info346]

I have been researching keywords in Google to find out what my competitors are doing to get listed in the top 10. I have found that many of the pages listed in the top 10 for many of the keywords I researched have no page ranking at all. My pages have a 0/10 page ranking but don't show up at all. Is 0/10 better, the same or worse than no page ranking?

Also, how can I find out how many incoming links my competitors have? Can I find out who is linking to them as well?

[Oman]

Go to http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com

It's interesting to see who's linked to your competition and to see how they links came about. Check with the link above and you'll start to see trends. In many cases you can use this to your advantage.

In my profession there's been some very well crafted and well thought out plans to build links. For instance, many of the links coming into sites for my competition were specifically built by the competition. At the bottom of all of these sites you'll see a logo...'built by' or 'powered by'. I'm assuming that the sites were built for free merely to build a series of links. Link farms? Sort of but I don't think search engines are going to see through the fact that each of these links is a uniquely designed site and within the same 'subject'.

Oman
http://www.myfootshop.com
http://www.drjoster.com
http://www.omanenterprises.com

[cbp]

A PR=0 is not necessarily a 0 - it is less then 1. PR is on a log scale - if you only have one link that Google knows about and you have no penalty, your PR is >0. Also note that the publically available PR on the toolbar is only updated periodically, so for some sites what you see may be meaningless (Google takes links into account internally, before they are publically availale via the toolbar)

Oman is right - Link Pop's tool gives you the back links from several engines --> gives a better picture.

If you competitors are PR 0, they should be easy to beat. Just match there keyword density, location and prominence and get more some links (preferabbly with the keyword in teh anchor text) to get your PR up --> you beat them.

CBP

[cyanide]

Don't be mistaken.

Pagerank has very little, if any - to do with how well your site comes up in search engine positioning.

It's quite easy and most common for 0 pr or lower pr sites to come up higher in search listings than higher pr sites.

[janeth]

I agree 100% with cbp

What you need to do is first make sure you have gotten some good key words. It sounds like you may want to do some research on what key words would get a good amount of hits for your business.
The pr is the total number of links coming into your site. For example if my site was a pr6 with all my links coming in with custom web site as my key word in my link I would be hard to beat for that key word.
But if your site was a pr1 with 20 links coming in using John's Pool Hall and then you also used John's pool Hall in your text another 50 times then you web site would rank better then mine for John's Pool Hall.
When you get into a very competitive key word like "computers" links and pr start playing into the game. But for a word like John's Pool Hall the amount of links and pr would not really matter.

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by Oman

Go to http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com

It's interesting to see who's linked to your competition and to see how they links came about. Check with the link above and you'll start to see trends. In many cases you can use this to your advantage.

Actually, I stumbled upon these guys somehow about 3 or 4 years ago - they will send you monthly emails comparing your site to your choice of up to three competitors for links to your site listed at Lycos/MSN, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb.

The only worry I have about this is I somehow managed to sign up to receive their emails twice (for the same three sites versus me) - these emails don't arrive on the same day but when they do come the results are different - leaving me to wonder which ones to believe or if I should believe either.

Anyone else have any experience with this service?

[rlrouse]

The PR0 pages that you're seeing at the top of the SERPS might be new, in which case no PR will show up on the toolbar until Google does the next update.

As cbp has already stated, most pages with a toolbar PR of 0 actually have a small amount of PR. PageRank has little to do with how well a page ranks for a given search term. On-page factors and inbound links with good anchor text count for a lot more, even if the pages doing the linking are PR1 (or even less).

[rlrouse]

Anyone else have any experience with this service?

You could test it by doing manual checks and comparing them to the results in the emails every once in a while. I haven't used the service but it does sound interesting.

[info346]

Should a link with anchor text for a keyword for one of my products be directed to my home page or to the page with that product on it? Does a the link to the home page help the product specific pages?

[rlrouse]

Product-relevant links should deep-link directly to the appropriate page IMO.

[cbp]

Product-relevant links should deep-link directly to the appropriate page IMO

Agreed. If the text in an anchor link mentioned a product, I would expect to be taken to it and not have to go looking for it. If the anchor text was the company name that sells the product .... maybe I would expect to go to the company site, then look for the product ...IMO..

Think of the user ... not ranking and PR.

CBP

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by cbp

Think of the user ... not ranking and PR.

Or, if you prefer, "Think of the user first... then worry about ranking and PR".