If No. 1 in search, how come P.R. of 6?

[Dustie]

Hi,

I have a question. A couple of my sites are number one in the search engine for their keywords, and yet they have a page rank of 6. One of the sites is Welcome to Real Estate Clipart.com, graphics and clipart for the online Real Estate Community and is number one in a search for Real Estate Clipart or Real Estate Graphics and yet is has a page rank of 6. Same goes for BeautifulBellaVista.com. Number one in a search of Bella Vista, Arkansas and a number of other Bella Vista searches and it's page rank is 6.

Another site, Internet Clipart.Com - Free Professional Graphics for YOUR personal or professional website., is number one in a search of fishing clipart,

I thought Google used page rank to bring back the most relevent sites in a search. If that's the case, shouldn't sites with a higher page rank then mine show up number one, or shouldn't my sites, being number one, have a higher page rank? I've always been confused on page rank anyway..and this doesn't help any. There's no way to get any higher then number one in the search engines..so how do I get a higher page rank?

Dustie

[wige]

Page rank is generally considered worthless as an SEO factor, because all that pagerank measures is backlinks; your pagerank is a relative indication of how many links your site has, weighted based on the page rank of the pages linking to you, which in turn is based on the page rank of the pages linking to them and so on. This gives no indication whatsoever of how relevant Google will find your site for a specific search query, although it is a factor.

[ctabuk]

Wige is spot on - the real reason that you are riding high is because you have a vast number of Relevant inbound links. Google has bypassed your tags, back in the days when keyword tags were considered important - you survived without them - Keep the linking process as it is - I think you are getting natural links. Coooool

[ashukairy]

Page rank of six is pretty good btw! It's not the best, but a lot of major sites rank way lower. You're doing something right!

[thegypsy]

Page rank is generally considered worthless as an SEO factor, because all that pagerank measures is backlinks; your pagerank is a relative indication of how many links your site has, weighted based on the page rank of the pages linking to you, which in turn is based on the page rank of the pages linking to them and so on. This gives no indication whatsoever of how relevant Google will find your site for a specific search query, although it is a factor.

whaaaaaaaa??? PR = Backlinks --- so then Backlinks = worthless??

That's a little harsh no? Last I heard BLs were important for ranking no??

PageRank is alive and well folks.. ( tho TBPR is pretty useless) - what has happened since 2004 is that PR is no longer a ONLY major factor in ranking. Other factors have been added to the over-all indexing and retrieval process in addition to PR..... so simply knowing a TBPR won't tell U the whole story. Actually Google recently updated the old PageRank patent .. I doubt they did that cause it is 'worthless'

Stating that "Page rank is generally considered worthless as an SEO factor" - shows a wee bit of ignorance to how ranking mechanisms work.....

Stop building backlinks and see how well U rank.... bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha......

[ashukairy]

Yeah, like I said Dustie, you're doing something right to get a page rank of 6. A lot of SEO companies out there don't even have that high of a page rank!! And like thegypsy said, backlinks are preetttty important.

[wige]

whaaaaaaaa??? PR = Backlinks --- so then Backlinks = worthless??

That's a little harsh no? Last I heard BLs were important for ranking no??

Not what I am saying at all. As far as Google is concerned, backlinks are one of the most important factors. What I am saying is that the toolbar PR is only a measure of empirical backlinks, weighted recursively based on the pagerank of pages linking to the linking pages and so on. As a matter of determining where you will rank, toolbar PR is irrelevant because it contains no contextual information, and thus is no indication of how relevant Google will find the page for a specific query.

( tho TBPR is pretty useless) - what has happened since 2004 is that PR is no longer a ONLY major factor in ranking. Other factors have been added to the over-all indexing and retrieval process in addition to PR..... so simply knowing a TBPR won't tell U the whole story.

Thats what I said.

Stating that "Page rank is generally considered worthless as an SEO factor" - shows a wee bit of ignorance to how ranking mechanisms work.....

Stop building backlinks and see how well U rank.... bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha......

But it is worthless - we aren't talking about "internal pagerank" we are talking about this page's pagerank of 6, which is the toolbar pagerank, which is out of date, and carries no relevance information - it is worthless. In fact, I would go so far as to say (read this twice before flaming) internal pagerank only influences SERP positions, as a minor wieghting factor to balance out other factors used to determine relevance. In other words, Google looks at link text, text near the link, on page elements, etc to determine the most relevant pages, and then uses the internal pagerank to "temper" that data and try further sort the results (already sorted by relevance) by popularity. This can shift items around in the SERPs, but if you had access to this internal pagerank, it still can't tell you how you will rank in a specific search because again, it is only a measure of the relative link popularity of the page.

[thegypsy]

Well I am pretty sure I knew what you were saying.. I have ranted about TBPR for quite some time..... Slashdot | The Google Toolbar PageRank Demystified

I just wanted to clear up the presentation of what was said..

TBPR is a useless metric.... ACTUAL PR is still alive and well and a major factor in the ranking process. There are simply other factors considered.

If ya want we're rambling about relevance in this thread http://www.webproworld.com/search-en...pywriting.html .... relating to stuff like 'Phrase Based indexing and retrieval' and 'Method and apparatus for learning a probabilistic generative model for text'

... fun stuff if yer into the technical side of things.....

Oh, and for the record? I don't FLAME.... I RANT.... he he

[mjtaylor]

whaaaaaaaa??? PR = Backlinks --- so then Backlinks = worthless??

That's a little harsh no? Last I heard BLs were important for ranking no??

PageRank is alive and well folks.. ( tho TBPR is pretty useless) - what has happened since 2004 is that PR is no longer a ONLY major factor in ranking. Other factors have been added to the over-all indexing and retrieval process in addition to PR..... so simply knowing a TBPR won't tell U the whole story. Actually Google recently updated the old PageRank patent .. I doubt they did that cause it is 'worthless'

Stating that "Page rank is generally considered worthless as an SEO factor" - shows a wee bit of ignorance to how ranking mechanisms work.....

Stop building backlinks and see how well U rank.... bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha......

Let's see: a PR of 8 or 9 is not going to get you ranked for anything unless the backlinks are relevant to the search term, so the PR is worth nothing unless the backlinks are relevant. So, it is the anchor text and the context of the backlink that actually is useful for SEO.

Now, on the other hand, a relevant backlink from a PR3 page with 10 outbound links is worth less, SEOw-ise, than an equally relevant link from a PR4 site with 10 outbound links so from that perspective PR is worth something, but on its own, PR *is* useless. It's the context that makes it of value and *not* the PR in and of itself.

Cheers, MJ

[thegypsy]

actually.... aggregate backlinks.. tightly related or not, will still get U ranked over lesser pages. Relevance is simply ONE factor... the model hasn't shifted that much yet.

Once again PR=backlinks and backlinks still carry heavy weighting. The relevance somes into play where further refinement of the returned results is based from relatively equal pages.

You were talking about a page here ranking for a given phrase ( in the other post) is that because there are a ton of backlinks to that page with that phrase as link text?? Or maybe because of the aggregate of BLs to this site?

... relevant BLs are the cat's ass.... but aggregate BLs are important as well....

BTW - I have agreed with what you are saying in essence -- in the other thread... I think you are simply putting too much respect into how much value the relevance has in the existing ranking mechanisms