Curious about Page Rank

[zman]

Hi all,

Ok so today I woke up, put on some coffee and fired up the comp. Much to my surprise an update had taken place so I was eager to find out about what changes took place that would affect me.

First of all, several months ago (January) I gave up chasing PR, in fact I scrapped the toolbar as suggested by many SEO's. Once I got rid of the PR bar I really started noticing the changes in my rank. Since I gave up on the PR bar I have watched traffic soar on certain keywords as page optimization has become the focus.

This morning I go and look at PR on my sites. It is nice to know what the PR is because that helps when aquiring link exchanges. On the sites that I have spent many hours getting link exchanges for the PR stayed the same. In fact one of my sites went from 80 backlinks showing in Google to 304, yet no change took place, the PR is still 4. Im not concerned about this because I am focusing on optimization for the most part. What I am curious about however is a site with only 7 backlinks, some being from my own sites, went from 0/10 to 5/10. The new website only has maybe 10 pages indexed and very little content as it is new and I havent spent any time on it.

How can this be? A site that was 4/10 with 80 backlinks moves up to 304 backlinks and PR stays the same. A site with few pages and a couple of backlinks jumps from 0/10 to 5/10.

I guess I am just curious as to whether this is common or not.

Thoughts?

[SEOforGoogle]

The site that went from 0-5 PR with only a few links may have jumped fro a few reasons:

1. One of the links pointing to that site has a PR of 6...
2. Coded better?
3. Maybe soemone at google really likes that site?

It's hard to say without being inside the mind of a G engineer, but I've personally seen #1 happen to some client sites...

[dejaone]

many sites wnet to PR6, but eventually set down at PR4 after a few updates. Google's algo is weird.

[adbart]

Originally Posted by dejaone

Google's algo is weird.

I wouldn't say it was 'weird', after all, the last thing Google wants to give its users is 'random results'. Their algorithm (in an ideal world) gives their users the most relevant results possible.

Exactly what their logic is regarding certain circumstances we can only guess at.

[jackit_chick]

To be honest with you, I've never used page rank to help me do SEO on my pages. I've heard too many ppl saying it's fake and random, and I highly doubt it is, but I don't think it's a huge factor that you should bend your SEO around.

[SEOforGoogle]

As a Google described PageRank: "It's accurate, but not precise"

We use it as a marketing tool if selling text links, otherwise, we only monitor it if a clients asks to do so.

[jacobwissler]

Page Rank appears to be a measure of the number, and quality of sites that link to you. Therefore, if a clean PR5 site with very few outbound links decides to link to you, the result should be a PR4 for you.

I have many PR4 sites with just 1 IBL and several PR5 sites with less than 10 IBL. It all depends upon the quality of the link. If you could get Microsoft to link to you from their index page, you could have a PR8 with just one IBL.

[zman]

The site has a link from one 5/10, two 3/10s and a couple 4/10s. Total of 7 backlinks and 5 of them are from my own site. The 5/10 backlink was not a 5/10 until this update.

Here is the kicker though...

EVERY backlink is matched EXACTLY to the content. Meaning they are EXTREMELY relevent links. Could this be doing it?

[obiztek]

Page Rank (PR) is not worth chasing for SEO.

After recent Google update my site is having PR6 but there is no quantum jump in the ranking as such.It has the same ranking patter when was having PR3 status.

My other sites where PR is not that high but they rank high most probaly due to the fact that there proper attention has been give the diferent department of SEO.

[Conficio]

Originally Posted by zman

"one of my sites went from 80 backlinks showing in Google to 304, yet no change took place, the PR is still 4."

Hi there,
to the best of my knowledge PR is a logarithmic scale. It could take a ten fold between PR4 and PR5 and another ten-fold for every subsequent step.

What is the base of the logarithm? Nobody knows. Also the number of links is not the only factor, the link relevance is calculated in there to.

K<O>

[Conficio]

Originally Posted by zman

EVERY backlink is matched EXACTLY to the content. Meaning they are EXTREMELY relevent links. Could this be doing it?

Hi again,
This is certainly important. It is the other factor in the PR equation, as far as Google describes it. Assume that every link get multiplied by a relevancy factor, so your PR = l1 * r1 + l2 * r2 + l3 * r3 ... +ln * rn then obviously the weight of each link li [i=1,n] is about the same, but the relevancy factor influences its real weight.

K<o>
P.S.: Don't take this formula literally, it does not fully make sense, but it simplifies the illustration of the principle.

[LuxurySleep]

PageRank is still alive and well. You have to realize PR is the first piece google looks at before running it through a bunch of other filters as expalined in the "Hill-Top" document. I think what it comes down too is what market are you trying to rank in? The more results for a search term the more filters goole has to put in place to combat web spam.

.02

[DMC_34]

Originally Posted by jacobwissler

If you could get Microsoft to link to you from their index page, you could have a PR8 with just one IBL.

I disagree. It used to work this way but I believe relevancy plays a role now. If the link is not relevant no PR will pass. It seems this changed to combat PR link buying. Just my .02

[Gary Golden]

Your main concern should be Keyword ranking, if you are ranked well on your keywords do not worry about PR ranking, there is no rhyme nor reason to how GOOGLE does its ranking all I no is that I rank higher than some PR6 or 7 sites on various keywords so I do not pay to much attention to the variations in my PR ranking.

Good Luck to all!

[DMC_34]

Originally Posted by Gary Golden

Your main concern should be Keyword ranking, if you are ranked well on your keywords do not worry about PR ranking, there is no rhyme nor reason to how GOOGLE does its ranking all I no is that I rank higher than some PR6 or 7 sites on various keywords so I do not pay to much attention to the variations in my PR ranking.

Good Luck to all!

I agree PR is overrated for established sites, but it does play an importance with new sites. It seems unless a site is a given PR it doesnt seem to pass a filter. Not only that you must have PR to get IBL's from exchanges. Without IBL's you wont rank therefore PR does play a role in keyword rankings but indirectly