Is PageRank the Primary Google Search Ranking Factor?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kevsta

a pagerank 1 page with 1 link (in total) from the page, which points to you, is stronger than a pagerank 4 page with 100 links from it, one of which points to you.

That is almost correct. It depends on the age and the its text too.

If I have a link on two different pages that have same age and link text, and the one page has PR 1 and only 1 link, it will be stronger than a link on the page with PR 4 which is accommodating i.e 100 links.

Just my two friendly cents.

PEACE.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Lower PR pages out rank higher PR pages ALL of the time.

Then you agree that on-page optimization is a major ranking factor too. Or did I miss something?

[kevsta]

haha spot on IMO my friend. anchor text is queen to linkstrength's king

as for age, do you have any opinions / experience as to the strength lifecycle of a link webnauts?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Then you agree that on-page optimization is a major ranking factor too. Or did I miss something?

Sure certain elements of on-page factors definitely help. Like I said SEO is like a recipe, many ingredients are involved and some are used more the others. In th end we are all trying to bake the best tasting cake.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kevsta

haha spot on IMO my friend. anchor text is queen to linkstrength's king

as for age, do you have any opinions / experience as to the strength lifecycle of a link webnauts?

These are the link strength factors from my observations:

1. Site Quality where the link is living.
2. Page Quality where the link is living.
3. Age of site where the link is living.
4. Age of the page where the link is living.
5. Age of the link.
6. Link text quality.
7. Site number of internal and external links where the link is living.
8. Page number of internal and external links where the link is living.
9. Quality of OBLs where the link is living.

I hope I did not forget anything. But isn't all that enough?

[bobitza]

PR is dead, long live PR!

Some people say that PR is "dead" and you should focus on great content, title tags, getting links, etc. Hello! How do you think you get a high PR? Unless Google uses the distance from their server to your server to rank your PR, PR IS about relevant content, IBLs, etc.

[kevsta]

lol thats more than enough. i much prefer the idea that:

1x PR4 page = 450 strength /1 link out = 450 strength link

wouldnt everything be so much easier? and how about observations regarding link weighting increasing over time?

i read somewhere that it takes up to about 6 months for a link to reach full strength even from a trusted site.

[bobitza]

Originally Posted by kevsta

i read somewhere that it takes up to about 6 months for a link to reach full strength even from a trusted site.

I read that too, in multiple places, so I guess there's no smoke without a fire, right?

Anyway, forget about PR, focus on internal and external SEO, which in the end will get you a .... you guessed right, a high PR! And when I say high it seems that 4 and 5 are regarded as "high". Very few websites are 6+.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kevsta

i read somewhere that it takes up to about 6 months for a link to reach full strength even from a trusted site.

I wouldn't doubt that. But my previous post tells that already.

[incrediblehelp]

Great post from Martinez (once again) for most that think they can figure out link juice and PR out using formulas:

SEO Metrics - Search engine marketing metrics - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Great post from Martinez (once again) for most that think they can figure out link juice and PR out using formulas:

SEO Metrics - Search engine marketing metrics - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

I read the whole article, and I honestly do not understand what does it have to do with the discussion here.
Can you be more specific were you and/or Michael agree or disagree?

[incrediblehelp]

Mostly throughout the article Michael is basically saying that no on can figure our PR:

I have no way of measuring Google’s PageRank. Neither do you.

In my opinion, of course. A group of Googlers could be reading this post and snickering at my naivete but the point is that if you don’t pass sufficient value from page A to page B where page B ranks above page A for the unique anchor text, you’re not helping your page B with links.


Technically, you cannot measure links or linking power. A lot of SEOs think they do this but their just spinning their wheels doing feel-good work.

Within this thread there seem to be a few formulas going around on how PR is measured, ideally. I think Michaels argument is that they are wrong.

[kevsta]

yea read it a while back. "figured it out" would be making too much of it, but when you only add one or two <strong> links at a time and see the results the same day the link caches you're half onto something. ..so try it again with another test link and new target different page / site, and lo and behold it works again,..

..in the end you (either can, or think you can) sort of see the pattern.

if you prefer to call me Neo, ..or "The One.." I dont mind

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by kevsta

and lo and behold it works again,..

What works again? I guess I am confused on what your trying to say?

Getting quality back links is always a good thing. Who said it wasnt?

[kevsta]

all im saying i suppose is that im convinced there is much value in looking at relative link strength ie. (guestimated) PR / OBL ratio of a page and that this still plays a significant part in the whole picture as far as Google results are concerned.

i know its based on guesswork but i think that all the other factors google look at in weighting links are likely increases or decreases of the initial link "strength" value.

and if you take the value of a standard link strength to be 1, and you are pointing 25's, 50's or even 125's at target pages, you see the results significantly quicker. overnight sometimes from one link.

it seems to me that if you power a page up PR wise with one or two strong links, even if they do not have the right anchor text, for the phrase you are trying to rank for, that then assigning your anchor text to the page from somewhere else, say a few forum sigs, is enough to propel the page right to the top.

i think even nofollowed links can work for assigning anchor text relevancy to the page, as long as the page has "pagestrength" (i'll call it) i.e powerful links pointed at it from somewhere else. i'll use an example of what im saying.

we have a client we've just taken on who have a partner website who were able to feed in a link of reasonable strength on a request from us. as its a newish site, apart from this they have virtually no links at all. like 3 or something. they currently sit at #5 for their own name but rank for almost nothing else in regard to their business.

when this powerful link caches i am predicting a #2 or maybe even #1 for their own name and that when we then aim anchor text from a few different places to the specific pages, they will respond much more quickly because the site now has some real PR flowing in it from the unrelated but strong link.

we are going to use high PR but nofollowed blog coments for a couple of weeks to try and replicate what weve seen before. if it works i'll write up a case study for you all

[Webnauts]

Matt Cutts confirmed that if you have less PageRank can also mean that a site wont rank well:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It
looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that.
For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links
on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if
Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have
less PageRank can also mean that a site won't rank as well.
If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to
that issue, in addition to the other good advice you've already
gotten.
Matt

More: Please Help! -60 penalty from Google due to proxy site. - Crawling, indexing, and ranking | Google Groups

[kevsta]

i saw that myself webnauts i believe i commented about that on someones blog somewhere

from the horses mouth..

[incrediblehelp]

Right John but worrying about PR is useless since you will never know how much a page has, LOL

[scanmonkey]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Great post from Martinez (once again) for most that think they can figure out link juice and PR out using formulas:

SEO Metrics - Search engine marketing metrics - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Good article on SEO Metrics anthini outside the toolbar. Kind of amazing but true that most pages are in the SI.

[kevsta]

incredible do you not think toolbar PR is at least a ballpark estimate?

yes it may be out by an unknown amount but do you really not pay any attention at all when sourcing links? eg mean if 6 weeks ago Google pronounced a site PR6 surely theres at least a fair chance its in the 5-7 range somewhere?

or not?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by kevsta

incredible do you not think toolbar PR is at least a ballpark estimate?

yes it may be out by an unknown amount but do you really not pay any attention at all when sourcing links? eg mean if 6 weeks ago Google pronounced a site PR6 surely theres at least a fair chance its in the 5-7 range somewhere?

or not?

Here is the deal with the TBPR. It doesnt matter to me.

I would rather focus my work on creating great unique content, help create a social community for client websites/blogs/forums, syndicating content and articles, making sure the clients website have great navigation and high quality back links.

I could care less when those pages I work on get green or dont. As long as they are getting crawled, indexed, traffic for targeted phrases THAT is what counts.

[thindenim]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Matt Cutts confirmed that if you have less PageRank can also mean that a site wont rank well:

More: Please Help! -60 penalty from Google due to proxy site. - Crawling, indexing, and ranking | Google Groups

Very interested to note that Matt highlighted creating a wordpress theme (with keyword anchor text) as "spamming". I've seen that recommended by others before, need to shoot them down in flames from now on

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I dont think it is as simple as that at all. Your never going to know what real PR is. Also PR is just number and by no means defines the credit, authority or worth of page. Lower PR pages out rank higher PR pages ALL of the time.

Eric Enge interview with Adam Lasnik (SEO Strategist at Google):

Eric Enge: Let's talk a little bit about internal links, specifically I have seen recommendations from Google that a hundred links per page is about as far as you should go. What happens when there are too many links on a page?

Adam Lasnik: There is actually a historical technical reason why we said try and keep it to a hundred links. In the really early days of Google with so many sites out there, we actually had at that time relatively limited resources. In our earlier days, we had to make tradeoffs on how broadly the Googlebot would crawl, and how deeply it would crawl.
We actually had this set limit; if the particular page is greater than a certain length then just grab the first part of that page.


Eric Enge: Right, first 100k or something.


Adam Lasnik: Exactly. I don't remember the exact number, but it was limited to a certain size. We found that the number of links also correlated with that. So, we realized that we would be doing Webmasters a favor by essentially reminding them or urging them to put their content on a number of different pages including your links, so that there is a greater chance we will be able to see, index, and appropriately digest them, and include those pages and the text on those pages in our cache.
Now, at this point, as you might guess, we have a heck of a lot more resources and the Googlebot is a lot more hardy, and it's not getting indigestion after even really, really, surprisingly large pages. However, there is a case for recommending smaller number of links based upon user interests. What we found is that sites that have a lot of links, two hundred, three hundred, of five hundred, tend to have links that have not been strongly editorially vetted.
We would rather see fewer links that the webmaster has actually looked over, and that they are maintaining to make sure they are still fresh. And, that's not to say that there aren't webmasters who actually are familiar with the three hundred to five hundred great resources that they or their team have checked out.
But then, you get to a point where how many users really want to scroll down on a page particularly as more and more users today are using alternate devices such as mobile phones, screen readers, and so on. For the user it largely makes sense to break these up by whatever criteria makes sense for the user. Also, from a PageRank perspective, having a ton of links means that each one of those links is going to pass less juice.

Source: Eric Enge interviews Google's Adam Lasnik

PEACE!

[incrediblehelp]

So you believe Adam now, but still dont care to believe Matt? Weird.

[kevsta]

you know, however complex the weighting of individual links ultimately becomes, it seems clear from what Google say (or don't say more often) that the most basic mechanics of this have got to be based on the arbitary flow of juice per link.

otherwise why would they be so bothered about downplaying PR so much, and the fact that people can buy or sell it to improve results?

ive asked that question in a few different forums now and never had better than the old "PR is dead" rubbish yet.

hopefully someone here can do better?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

So you believe Adam now, but still dont care to believe Matt? Weird.

First what Adam mentioned in that interview was not at all new to me, and it was always obvious for me since I am involved in SEO. But as I am not an authority, (if you understand why I say that ), I presented my position with the support of a Google employee.

Are you claiming now that Adam and Matt are claiming something different? Can you explain what Matt said that it does not fit to Adam's s interview?

PEACE.

[Webnauts]

I am not working for Matt Cutts. probably you?

Andrew R H Girdwood: Do you work for Matt Cutts?

[saif]

I still think this is how it works at a much simplified level.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Right John but worrying about PR is useless since you will never know how much a page has, LOL

I worry about PR and I do not think it is useless to worry about because I cannot tell in numbers how much PR a page has.

[Peter (IMC)]

Google say it them selves. Pagerank is at the heart of their Algorithms.

Google Technology

The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.

So there's your answer...

But many people think Pagerank isn't important. And if you just analize the toolbar then it is really difficult to see a relation between PR and positions. I never really understood why people then conclude that PR isn't important. Everybody agrees that titles are important, but just putting the right title isn't going to get you high rankings either.

PR is the heart of the software. That means that most algorithms don't work without PR. Since PR is purely based on links, the algorithms don't work without links. That's why 0 links means 0 pages indexed in Google. (except when you just submitted a new site to Google and they´re waiting for links to appear on the web and find them. In this specific case they´re going to not use PR to rank your pages. That's why once they did find a link, your rankings generaly drop like a stone.)

So PR is extremely important, but its not something to waste your time on. It's like air. You really do need air in order to fly, but you really don't have to worry about the existence of air. It exists!

On the moon there is no air and no plane or bird will get off the ground there. Without PR, you can pretty much consider yourself to be on the moon.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

So PR is extremely important, but its not something to waste your time on. It's like air. You really do need air in order to fly, but you really don't have to worry about the existence of air. It exists!

On the moon there is no air and no plane or bird will get off the ground there. Without PR, you can pretty much consider yourself to be on the moon.

Interesting and amusing analogy. And valid. Thanks, Peter.

I agree that I mustn't waste time on PR ... and for me that means, the focus is not on PR, per se, however, I do believe that if I have a page that is not getting PR, I probably need to focus on links to that page (or clear up duplicate content issues, perhaps ... but most likely, links. Relevant, quality links, of course.

Cheers, MJ

[incrediblehelp]

OK since toolbar PR is not important and no one but Google knows what your internal PR is, why do people think they can worry about PR? Doesnt make sense to me.

[crankydave]

A little late but I'll chime in John and answer the question in your title directly...

Is PageRank the Primary Google Search Ranking Factor?

No it is not. It can't be. Internally or externally, PageRank is a number. The primary ranking factor is what Google believes to be "most relevant". How PR affects "relevance" will certainly remain a matter of endless debate.

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by crankydave

A little late but I'll chime in John and answer the question in your title directly...



No it is not. It can't be. Internally or externally, PageRank is a number. The primary ranking factor is what Google believes to be "most relevant". How PR affects "relevance" will certainly remain a matter of endless debate.

Dave

YEEEEES!!

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

OK since toolbar PR is not important and no one but Google knows what your internal PR is, why do people think they can worry about PR? Doesnt make sense to me.

Well if we should not worry about PageRank (NOT TOOLBAR), then we do not need to worry about link building, page importance, site navigation structure, etc, or?

Also, if we do not not need to worry about PR, then we do not need to worry about pages found in the supplemental index either, or?

Anyway.

And once again, my point is not about PR measured in numbers, like PR 1, PR 2, etc . It is about the weight it has in sorting out the relevancy of a site, the site crawling frequency, rankings, etc.

PEACE.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by crankydave

A little late but I'll chime in John and answer the question in your title directly...



No it is not. It can't be. Internally or externally, PageRank is a number. The primary ranking factor is what Google believes to be "most relevant". How PR affects "relevance" will certainly remain a matter of endless debate.

Dave

Dave I was just reading here Google Technology how searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results. Did I misunderstand something there?

PEACE.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Well if we should not worry about PageRank (NOT TOOLBAR), then we do not need to worry about link building, page importance, site navigation structure, etc, or?

Nope not saying that at all. I am saying we should not worry about stuff we cant control, like PR. We can control and utilize things like link building, page importance, site navigation structure and we know improving these things make a difference. These things are tangible, unlike PR.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Nope not saying that at all. I am saying we should not worry about stuff we cant control, like PR. We can control and utilize things like link building, page importance, site navigation structure and we know improving these things make a difference. These things are tangible, unlike PR.

We can't control PR? Utilizing things like link building, page important, site navigation structure e.t.c aren't techniques to improve/boost PR of a web site?

Have I probably misunderstood something again? Brother, please be so kind and clarify that.

Peace.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Internally or externally, PageRank is a number.

Dave, does that mean that algorithms like "PhraseRank", "Trust Rank", e.t.c aren't numbers or calculated in numbers?
Can you be more specific?

Peace.

[incrediblehelp]

What I am trying to make clear is link building and other techniques are important to the core goal of ranking well and achieving traffic through Google. I am simply removing the PR issue totally as it really makes no difference at all to me.

I think your mixing things up a bit John. The reason we all are doing this is to get more traffic that will convert into sales. I could careless what my PR is.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

What I am trying to make clear is link building and other techniques are important to the core goal of ranking well and achieving traffic through Google. I am simply removing the PR issue totally as it really makes no difference at all to me.

I think your mixing things up a bit John. The reason we all are doing this is to get more traffic that will convert into sales. I could careless what my PR is.

Since I am also concerned to get more traffic which can convert into sales through the organic search engine results, and since PageRank is an important ranking factor, no matter how small or big, I care about it the same as I care about "PhraseRank" and all other indexing/ranking factors for my site and of my respective customers.

You said that you are simply removing the PR issue totally as it does not make no difference for you at all?
Then I assume that i.e sites supplemental ratio is not an issue for you either. Right?
Or did I mix something up again?

Peace.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I could careless what my PR is.

Could it be that you are talking about the toolbar? That is not what I am talking about.
Just to make things clear here.

[crankydave]

PageRank is a number. It alone is not "relevance" specific. A page does not have more PageRank for "keyword1" than it does for "keyword2". PageRank is static. That is to say that at any given point in time, a page has a single PageRank value.

Google rankings are query based. The most important thing when it comes to ranking is how a page relates to the query being made... relevance. How any other factors influence relevance, ie PageRank, are secondary to relevance itself.

Any ranking factor or possible ranking factor does one thing, influences relevance.

Dave

[Webnauts]

As we all know, Google’s algorithm is extremely sophisticated, and I would say that it boils down to something like this:

Search Ranking = Relevance x PageRank

Relevance is the measure of how a web site or I would rather say one of your web pages, matches the search term the user has entered.

PageRank is an independent measure of Google’s perception of the quality, authority and credibility of an individual web page, and it does not depend on any particular search term.
In addition, PageRank is based on a logarithmic scale.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

As we all know, Google’s algorithm is extremely sophisticated, and I would say that it boils down to something like this:

Search Ranking = Relevance x PageRank

Relevance is the measure of how a web site or I would rather say one of your web pages, matches the search term the user has entered.

PageRank is an independent measure of Google’s perception of the quality, authority and credibility of an individual web page, and it does not depend on any particular search term.
In addition, PageRank is based on a logarithmic scale.

Here's how I see it John...

Ranking=Relevance x Everything that affects and/or influences relevance

For example, we can strip all the links on a site of their anchor text. That's going to affect relevance and thus, rankings. At least relevance as it is percieved by Google.

In either case, relevance is the most important ranking factor. I'm sure we both could list a whole lot of different things than can, do, and might affect relevance.

Dave

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Here's how I see it John...

Ranking=Relevance x Everything that affects and/or influences relevance

For example, we can strip all the links on a site of their anchor text. That's going to affect relevance and thus, rankings. At least relevance as it is percieved by Google.

In either case, relevance is the most important ranking factor. I'm sure we both could list a whole lot of different things than can, do, and might affect relevance.

Dave

I think Dave we are getting close to hack Googles concept.

And you know what else?

I think I've found that GoogleBot was crawling my local hard drive!

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

I think Dave we are getting close to hack Googles concept.

And you know what else?

I think I've found that GoogleBot was crawling my local hard drive!

LOL John!

Sounds to me you might need to call an exterminator!

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Ranking=Relevance x Everything that affects and/or influences relevance

Right Dave this is basically what I am trying to say. I think John is on the same page he is just saying "PR" and we are saying " Everything that affects and/or influences relevance".

[buddhu]

Although I've been here a long time I rarely post, as others generally say the important stuff better than I do. But for what it's worth, here are a few thoughts - mostly just repeating what others have said.

* I think all newbies would do well to read up on the original G PageRank theory before trying to follow debates on the subject. It's helpful to understand the theory before getting stuck with the idea that PR is just a score on a green bar.

* PageRank (if you believe the bar at all) as shown may be useful in checking if a potential link-partner has a ban. If I see a site with PR0 or a grey bar it reminds me to check the index to see if they have a ban before wasting my time.

* Your own site's PageRank (as shown by the bar) isn't worth worrying about as far as your ranking is concerned. I suppose if you have high bar PR then it may be a carrot to dangle if you sell links to webmasters with PR fixations.

* Other factors have been introduced since PageRank. Trust plays a much larger part than it used to. If you get a link from an established PR4 page of a site with trusted status (especially .edu or .gov etc) then it may be more beneficial than a link from a PR5 page of a commercial site with less history and trust.

*Who says that the PR you see on the bar is any more reliable than the sample you see when you do a "link:" search (if anyone still does that...)

* I think Webnauts' list was pretty good:

1. Site Quality where the link is living.
2. Page Quality where the link is living.
3. Age of site where the link is living.
4. Age of the page where the link is living.
5. Age of the link.
6. Link text quality.
7. Site number of internal and external links where the link is living.
8. Page number of internal and external links where the link is living.
9. Quality of OBLs where the link is living.

* Just do all the right things. Don't try to count PageRank. If your site content is good enough, if your site is intesting and dynamic (in the sense of excitment, not of database-generated pages!) and if you promote your site well enough, you'll naturally get links that send you the best kind of juice.

[mitosblog]

As for me the answer is YES. Since my blog is upgraded from PR 2 to PR 3 I noticed that Google sent more referrals than the previous PR 2.