Order in SERP

I thought it was supposed to descend!

[chewy]

Hi,

I hope I am not 'wrong' on this one.

I just told my customer that the order in the Google SERP is established in part by Page Rank with the higher ones at the top.

Then I quickly back-pedaled as I noticed the first few sites on a search were at PR 4 and then below that were some sites at PR 5 and then below that there were some at PR 6.

(initially this looked good as this is a very competitive employment term, and as we have PR of 5, I figured this was good, we would beat 4...Then I noticed the apparent ascending order and thought "oh jeeze... gotta check this with WebmasterWorld!)

Other common terms seem in descending PR order as I would expect.

Theories please:

Is this consistent with what others are seeing?

Is this a sign of something we can / might anticipate in the future?

Or is this just an aberration, likely to clear up soon?

Thanks,

Chew

[vitaplease]

There is a difference between Pagerank and Page Rank in the search engine results.
Mr Page from Google should have thought about this confusion before thinking about his own name;)

Pagerank (the toolbar indicator) is an indication of relative importance of that page, judged amongst others by the amount and importance of the links to that page.

from: [google.com...]

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query

The search engine rankings are judged by the Google algorithm that takes Pagerank into consideration as one of the many factors.

Basically it makes sense, if your the most important expert on machine tools, with a pagerank of 7, this does not mean you should rank high for "metal", just because the word is mentioned once in the body text of that page.

[jcoronella]

A correct statement might be "all other things being equal, a higher PR page will rank higher".

The problem is "all other things" is a very large set.

[MurphyDog]

Even with lower page rank the page with better keyword density, better title tags, etc. will often appear higher.

[chewy]

OK,

So to recast this in simplistic terms, a higher TPR (toolbar Page Rank) would, all things being equal, tend to rank pages in the SERP in an order directly proportional to the TPR numbers. A higher TPR gets you nearer the top, and a lower one gets you nearer the bottom.

Yet there are factors that potentially weigh more heavily than TPR and tend to create SERPs where pages rank out of order relative to TPR numbers.

Am I getting it?

Chew

[allanp73]

I am sure the factors which determine what makes a site rank well can be found on webmster world. PR is important but if it were the only thing there would be only a hand full of sites that would dominate for every term.

[mat_bastian]

there are reportedly over 100 variables in google's algo. PR and the variabls that attribute to PR are onbly a part of that algo. probably a rather small part.

It takes the total package.

when all else is equal, PR can give you a nudge towards the top. Not much more than that.