Grading pages by PageRank

What's wrong with this method?

[victor]

If I do an in-site search for a word that I know is on almost all my pages, e.g.:

"the" site:www.dummy-site.com

I seem to get the pages of my site more-or-less in PageRank order on the SERP -- allowing me to see fine graduations in all those 5s and 4s.

Or am I deluding myself?

[incywincy]

i just tried it on my own website and the returned results were not in page rank order.

i have 5 parts of my site in different dmoz categories and the first 5 results were these pages. a page further down in the serps had a higher pr than some of the first 5.

[chiyo]

That's very interesting Victor. Im not sure if its via pagerank, only because i didnt do a full check, but its certainly mirroring the most popular pages at the top.

[fathom]

Content is king... PageRank would unlikely bias the "the" results.

I would think?

[bird]

If you find a word that appears exactly once on all your pages, ideally in the same place, then this method probably works as expected. In our example, the word "the" will appear in different places and numbers on individual pages, skewing the result significantly.

<added>The pages should also be of approximately the same size, or short pages may get an unfair advantage... ;) </added>

[victor]

Thanks for the replies guys.

You inspired me to improve the method (i.e. mess around when I should have been working).

I got as far as this:

inurl:htm site:www.dummy-site.com

That gets me all my pages (cos they all have htm in the url). They are in some sort of consistent order....Google lists the ones it likes the most earlier on. And (today at least) the ordering is consistent across www, www2 and www3

But it isn't pure PageRank -- maybe as bird suggests it's an amalgam of Pagerank, page size, freshness, and other factors.

It's an objective ordering that tells me something. I'm just not sure what. If I knew, it might help tweak the pages that are not quite top-ranking.