Google PageRank

What does it really mean?

[Bonusbana]

I have been working on our site and just found out that our google pr increased from 4 to 7 during the last 6 months. Great news, I thought. But I cant really see any difference in the search engine results.

We have a .se domain and the site ranks 7. There is a .net domain with the same name and it ranks 6. Still that domain shows up first when searching for our companys name. Also, I havent really noticed any difference in keywords search.

Is google pagerank something to rely on? What should I gain from having 7 instead of 4? And why isnt there any "real" difference?

Im kind of new to SEO so any reply would be helpful.

thanx

[Igor]

SE ranking depends mostly on backlinsk from RELEVANT web pages.

PR can be increased even if you get links from absolutely different websites (e.g. if you work wit 'web design' and your link partner(s) - with 'furniture')

Second aspect: please make sure that you get links with 'right' link titles.

For example, if you're web design company, you need to get links saying

'web design' --> [...your...] url...

And of course take a look at your competitors.

There're many competitive fields (web design, hosting etc) and you need to have many thousands relevant backlinks (strong backlinks) in order to be somewhere in top 50.

I"m not sure if it helps you, anyway, more useful advice I need at least the url of your website.
(you may PM me - I"m always glad to help)

[Bonusbana]

Thank you for your answer.

I think you misundersttod me, Im not asking how to get higher ranking or more visitors. Im asking what I can expect from google when our PR increases. IE what does it really mean to get higher PR.

thank you
:david

[webnewton]

Is google pagerank something to rely on? What should I gain from having 7 instead of 4? And why isnt there any "real" difference?

Google PR used to matter in the past. The basic defination of PR is that it ranks you based on the popularity of your site on the web which is measured by the no.of link pointing to your site.
Besides having a nice PR you need a lot other things to make it to the top. Better you consult some good SEO who can guide you how to achieve that.

[steveb]

PR matters a lot in many ways. The most clear one these days is that higher PR leads to heavier crawling. This may not matter much to some domains, but it is obviously critical to any domain with topical content. And it is also critical to domains that are trying to rank for hundreds or thousands of search terms. There are a lot of areas where all the pages are more or less the same, selling the same widget or whatever. PR will be one of the key tiebreakers in terms of ranking such similar pages. In your case, having a main page go from PR4 to 7, you should be able to rank sub-pages far better for a wide variety of terms.

[rfgdxm1]

>SE ranking depends mostly on backlinsk from RELEVANT web pages.

Care to provide evidence this is the case for Google? I see little evidence that Google considers the relevance of linking pages.

[sit2510]

>>> Im not asking how to get higher ranking or more visitors. Im asking what I can expect from google when our PR increases. IE what does it really mean to get higher PR.

--------------------------------------

You can expect higher ranking and more visitors when your PR increases. If that's not the case, then you may have to review your past strategy, especially the effective use of "anchor text". Perhaps there are many flaws in your strategy so you don't see any difference when your site jump from PR4 to PR7 in the last 6 months.

And what you get now is the higher "prestige". With this prestige, you can invite or direct people to vote for you for your targeted terms. It makes your task much easier and many people would welcome your invitation especially when you vote or link back to them with high pr pages.

[newbies]

The strange thing is I found site with higher PR than my site. When I did a link search, google returns 0 link for that site, and 400 links to my site. My site used to be higher than that site and it decreased after I used adsense.

[mfishy]

SE ranking depends mostly on backlinsk from RELEVANT web pages

Have you looked at the Google SERPS ever?

[cabbie]

>>I see little evidence that Google considers the relevance of linking pages.

I am seeing evidence of this and have done so for a few months now.

Pr may pass from any link but having relevant links helps heaps in the serps.IMO
I agree as SteveB says,page rank is still important in helping your sites being crawled as well as enabling you to target more keywords.

[digitalv]

PageRank is a measure of how many sites link to you - nothing more. Having a higher PageRank doesn't help your position on any given keyword.

It may SEEM like it does because to have a high PageRank = having inbound links, and relevant inbound links CAN make your site appear higher in the results. But PageRank itself has nothing to do with it - it's just a number for display only. Which is why I laugh at people who buy sites based on PageRank alone.

I have one site that has a PR of 4 and this site always comes up in the top 3 on relevant keywords. Another site has a PR of 8 and you can never seem to find it by the topics, only by the name. The PR8 site has a lot of inbound links, which is why the number is so high, but none of those links are from related sources.

There are fewer than 10 sites that link to the PR4 site, but the CONTENT of the site is relevant to the search terms.

So in other words ... quit putting so much emphasis on that little green bar. It doesn't mean squat when it comes to the actual results or traffic. Getting a high PageRank number is EASY - it took less than two weeks for the site I'm talking about to reach an 8. Doesn't help when you can't find it in the searches though :)

[steveb]

"But PageRank itself has nothing to do with it - it's just a number for display only."

The girl who can't dance says the band can't play.

Of course PR is not "just a display". It's one of the algorithmic ingredients that effect ranking.

See conroy's great post here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[cabbie]

If you have a pr7 and not scoring competitevly then you are not using that page rank properly.Even if the pr has come from unrelated sites,you should be able to utilise that pr to create related links.My 2cents.

>>The girl who can't dance says the band can't play.

Nice one SteveB.

[Pimpernel]

If you have a pr7 and not scoring competitevly then you are not using that page rank properly.

Agree 100 percento! Although with a little caveat - pagerank of 10 will be completely useless to rank top under generic terms. High PR is great for ranking under more specific terms on any subject you care to mention. If you want top under the real generic terms then you need to have relevant links, to have been around for a long time and for your site to be very clearly about that one thing and that one thing only.

[digitalv]

If you have a pr7 and not scoring competitevly then you are not using that page rank properly.

You kinda just made my point for me while arguing it :) PageRank is not an "ingredient" it is the NUMERIC OUTPUT of several ingredients. It really IS nothing more than a sliding scale of how many sites link to you because, as you pointed out, relevance is not factored in.

I can get tons of links from sites all over the web, and would receive a high PageRank in return - but those links aren't helping me in the search results unless the referring site (or the anchor text) is relevant to my site. Which is what I said.

[Pimpernel]

No you are not following me. If you have high PR you can get good rankings on quite specific terms regardless of the theme of sites linking to you. Where PR does not work well is in getting you good rankings under generic terms unless many of the sites linking to you are closely related to that generic term

[rfgdxm1]

>Where PR does not work well is in getting you good rankings under generic terms unless many of the sites linking to you are closely related to that generic term

I've yet to see any evidence that whether the sites linking to you a related is at all relevant to Google. My guess is either Google lacks the technological ability to determine this, or if they can it isn't worth the effort.