Optimization Trumps Page Rank

Has PR been de-emphasized?

[Go60Guy]

In what I'm seeing now on www2 & www3, it appears clearly that optimization in considerably more important than Page Rank.

For several of my most crucial keyword combinations, pages with a PR2 have moved above my PR5-6 pages, knocking me out of #1 or #2 or #3 positions into 2s,4s 5s, etc. In comparing the two sites (leaving aside the fact that the other site plagerized some of my copy), it bacame clear to me that the higher ranking pages were better optimized.

This is a wake up call. I've just made changes which I trust will be picked up in the ensuing crawls. Hopefully, then, my higher PR will give me the edge.

I had let my pages go without touching them as long as they were doing better than the others. I'm really grateful for all the knowledge I've garnered on this and other boards.

[WebGuerrilla]

I would not read too much into this. If a PR2 is still beating out a PR6 after the first week of August, then it would be a topic worthy of discussion.

The same thing happened last month. (And I seem to remember a similar thread). A couple of weeks later things had settled back to normal looking results.

[Go60Guy]

Thanks WebGerrilla: There's no doubt that I needed to do a better job of optimization, so that's probably the benefit I'm receiving from this exercise. Hopefully what you say will enable PR to carry the day in the final analysis.

[wingslevel]

Same for me, on several of my keywords I am noticing some pr 4 pages getting into the top 10 - these are tough keywords and I have never seen pr 4's in the top 10 before....