Forum Moderators: open
One reason I have found, when you have many low PR incoming links (more than 500) and a PR3 or PR4 you will be higher than a PR6-7 site with only 1-100 links.
Also most of these high ranked low PR sites do crosslinking and have many outbound links. I could give you many examples, but I can't post URLs here.
More ideas?
Quanity links get higher listings - doesnt matter about relevancy either.
If I run a search on Google for, say, a particular "region", using a one word search, then I get a set of results.
If I repeat the search for, say, "region hotels", then I get a different set of results (obviously you may say).
On the first set site A with high PR may come up high on the serps, site B with low PR may come low. However on the 2 word search the order may be reversed.
Happily PR does not determime serps irrespective of query.
I have a very content rich site that - because it is fairly new and I have not amassed a huge catalogue of unrelated links-in - ranks at PR4. However, it is top 5 or better on most relevant search terms (and I am talking #5 out of hundreds of thousands on major terms). The reason is attention to detail and providing a lot of original, legitimate, useful, non-spammy content on pages that Googlebot, so far....fingers crossed, spit in the ocean....loves.
You have 2 choices to get good serps: you can go with minimal content pages and do battle purely on links-in and borderline spam techniques or you can spend your time generating good original content that Google parses and "judges" of high relevance. If you can combine the 2 techniques, you are on your way to PR8 land.
Give me PR0 and accurate match to my query than a pr6-7-8-9-10 page that gets top ranking cos it has been around since the dawn of time and have a large presense.
IMHO
2) One person mentioned in-bound anchor text which is also as important, though, not as improtant as it used to be.
3) Another factor is site structure. If I have a car site and want to rank high on the term auto parts, I would structure my site like:
level one (homepage):
subject cars
level two (main cat):
subject auto parts (my target)
level three (sub cats):
multiple pages with subjects like foreign auto parts, domestic auto parts, japanese auto parts, etc. that all link back to level two with the anchor text "auto parts".
My level 2 page can have a low PR and rank very well for searches that include the phrase auto parts.
I think figment88 hit the nail on the head for the reason behind what happened. This term "lawyer fees" is an incidental reference on a page that has a paragraph heading of "How lawyers charge fees" and then lawyers and fees are mentioned several times in the body of the article. It is a second level page and has several pages referring back to it. Interesting.
If figment88 is correct, wouldn't we all be better off breaking up a long page on "widgets" into one page for widgets and then several pages below, referring back to widgets, named "best use for widgets" "how to get a widget" "how to feed your widget" etc.?
Chris
Quanity links get higher listings - doesnt matter about relevancy either.
Nonsense.
If the above statement was true, then Adobe, Macromedia, Apple, MSN, Yahoo, etc. would be the only sites that ever came up for searches... regardless of what is being searched for.
You have a lot to learn then - sticky me and I will give you all the proof you need.
I've seen low PR sites score higher, but this doesn't happen often.
In my opinion, the higher your PR, the more power you have to target a particular keyword phrase. In general, if you are not targeting the phrase, then you will lose out to the savvier webmaster.
But if you have the PR, and know how to nail those keywords, then the only competition you have to worry about are those who are your PR peers.
You have a lot to learn then
Amen. I'm a part time teacher, a full time student, and work hard to consciously insure that fact never changes.
sticky me and I will give you all the proof you need.
Thanks, but I'll pass. I'm fairly picky about who I take my lessons from.
Based on Google's current algorithm it is inevitable that many of the top ranking sites will also often display the greatest number of links in their niche, but suggesting that relevance has nothing to do with their rankings is patently absurd.
Their popularity is entirely based on the relevance of their results.
Are there exceptions? Of course there are... thousands upon thousands of them, but when you're indexing billions of pages, and trying to sort them in an intelligent fashion, exceptions are absolutely inevitable.
For every site you can show me that is topping the SERPs which has major link pop and little relevance, there are a dozen other examples of low PR, low inbound link pages which are trumping sites with twice the link pop and PR.
Bottom line...
Remove relevance from the equation altogether to rank purely by link pop and there'd be no need for a search box to enter keywords... you'd just have a static list of sites ordered by inbound links much the way alexa has a list of sites ordered by traffic tracked via their toolbar.
Might be interesting reading... but it wouldn't do a darn thing towards helping you find information on the web.
Based on Google's current algorithm it is inevitable that many of the top ranking sites will also often display the greatest number of links in their niche, but suggesting that relevance has nothing to do with their rankings is patently absurd.
With you all the way on that statement. Google themselves say
Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm.
Page Rank is NOT the only factor, though conspiracy theorists may think so
I think a dozen was an under estimate....but I'm with you in principle Dante_Maure.
Google by its very nature can not be perfect. It is only important it gets the SERP's close to correct most of the time.
Does it? Well the majority seem to think so, if not why do they use it? :)
Or is it just "hunches", "speculation" or a good discussion?
Are we considering google's ranking method more complex than it actually is? Why not:
- keyword is onpage relevance
- pagerank is offpage popularity
- anchor keyword is the relevance of page popularity
As simple as that for relevance?
I'm sure that a lot of members here could come up with a more 'themed' approach, but could we scale it to 3,083,324,652 web pages (and search them in a third of a second)?
- keyword is onpage relevance
- pagerank is offpage popularity
- anchor keyword is the relevance of page popularity
I don't know if it's that simple, but you've written a great Cliff's Notes version of Google for Dummies. :-)
