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1) when i do a search on my site with google using the "similar pages"-command in the toolbar i get only 30 guestbookresults and 3-4 similar results! this shows me that the main theme for my website is not my most relevant keyword, but guestbooks. so when you sign guestbooks (no matter if you use your keywords in the link text) google will interpret it in this way that your site is about guestbooks! (why would i otherwise get guestbook-results when using the similar pages-command!)
2) my keywords NEVER appear in the top ten of the serp's although all results above me have lower pr! you don't believe it? sign guestbooks and you'll see! it's really bad, because my keywords are everywhere on my pages (title, meta, alt, filenames, url, link anchor, keyword density, just everything! i used brett ranking tipps)
i would do everything to get a pr4 instead of my pr6 if i could just remove this stupid links from the guestbooks - it was the biggest mistake i could ever make and i really advice everyone who is playing with guestbooks not to do it.
i better get a new domain - all my work since august has been destroyed just because i was so stupid to sign guestbooks :(
Now I am convinced that Google has upped the weightage of the incoming links page content.
[edited by: Namaste at 12:41 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2003]
no the content is 100% different, just the design is the same.
In that case, aren't you comparing apples and oranges?
I also believe it is theming of content of pages from which a page receives links, the theming of content now is a very important factor!
Just numbers don't always tell how competitive a market is. There can be searches that return 100,000 that are killer competitive, and others that return well over a million pages that aren't. It depends on who's being competed against and whether a lot of the sites are well optimized.
Generally speaking, with those numbers decent optimization can beat higher Page Rank hands down. There's sometimes an assumption that high PR automatically means high rankings and it just isn't always so.
>>theming of content of pages from which a page receives links, the theming of content now is a very important factor!
I think we need to give that serious thought. Maybe it's not to the point of definition as a themes-based engine, but with over 100 factors that go into scoring, remembering what the factors are that go into determining theming can definitely give an edge over relying on PR alone.
Good old-fashioned overall optimization with PR as a plus can make a site less vulnerable to serious fluctuations from minor algo changes.
This shows: The incoming link from the high PR site has DEFINITELY improved PR substancially. But the Ranking-Positions for all the keyword phrases have NOT improved!
My conclusion is: Higher PR may or may not improve ranking depending on other factors. My guess is: Theme of the site and/or page (from where the link comes) is already one of the 100 factors of Google. (Or: Three links on different pages of a high PR site may be considered link spamming, particularly if there are not many other incoming links.)
For my employer's index page, I changed the title, and the three keywords we cared about plus our company name (which included one keyword). I also replaced image swaping with div swaping and added the alt text that was missing and our site went from way down, to the first page for for our two keyword search term in all the search engines not just google.
Our title is
blah blah keyword1: keyword2 keyword3
It reads fine in English and looks good in search results. This one change was as clever as I get. (or was allowed to get)
However we aren't selling blue widgets so I don't think there is that much competition for some of the keywords.
Muskie
Anne
I don't know how one could test this but I still suspect that an inviting title would be clicked on more than an adjoining bland one.
Anne
