pagerank & hits

Newbie looking for info

[eWhisper]

I've read a lot about pagerank here and on many search engine forums. The concept makese sense, but the pratical application sometimes seems confusing.

One of my sites, all the pages are pr 4-5.
However, for every major keyword I'm trying to get (about 20), I've got a top 20 ranking for half, and a top 10 ranking for the other half, and of those 10 I've got a top 3 ranking for 6 of them. In fact, for several pages that have a much higher pr than I do, I come up higher in G for those terms.

I just checked for one heavily searched keyword phrase (two words) which has 1790 competitors. My page comes up 1st in G in exact search, 3rd in fuzzy, with a pr of 4. The other competitors all have prs of 5-6 (and I've not seen any pr7 pages that I'm competiting against).

The same goes for several other terms that I'm working for. How does this all work out considering that my results are higher than my pr?

Thanks,
eWhisper

[top5jamaica]

hmm .. maybe you've got good quality anchor links coming into your pages .. maybe your keyphrase is not that competitive .. maybe you should say thanks that you are getting the rankings :)

what's 'fuzzy'?

[eWhisper]

An exact search is: "blue widget"
menaing only sites that have that exact phrase are returned in search results.

A fuzzy search is: blue widget (no quotes)
maning sites with both words in any parts of the page are returned.

[JayC]

In fact, for several pages that have a much higher pr than I do, I come up higher in G for those terms.

There's nothing odd about that at all. PageRank is just one of the factors involved in ranking.

Just as you might come ahead in the serps for a given phrase that a competitor has used more effectively in his page title (for example) by doing other things more effectively than he does, so can you come ahead of a page with higher PR on the strength of other elements of the ranking algorithms -- either on-page or off (i.e. link anchor text, as top5jamaica suggested).

[Mohamed_E]

Let me stress what JayC says, there is very much more to the Google algorithm than page rank.

In the original paper describing Google, available at [www7.scu.edu.au...] the authors write (Section 4.5.1):

Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence.

In Google's Information for Webmasters [google.com...] they go further and say:

Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm.

PageRank is very visible if you use the toolbar, please remember that it is one of a hundred factors!

[eWhisper]

Thank for the info. I've never been overly concerned about pr before, and it's something people seem to really concentrate on around here, which could be because it's measurable.