Forum Moderators: open
Now, I understand that keywords on the results need to be there and they need to be upfront in the title following one another.
So assuming they are both the same PR this one bellow would rank higher than the one below for
key word search of: red mice
Red Mice - Cartoon characters illustrated including...
Cartoon Mice - characters of red mice ....
Fine. Now, assuming I am keepin this in mind, why would a PR3 page rank much higher than a PR6 page, again assuming keywords placement results in the index results are equal.
In fact, I found a site that had poorer keyword placement combined with a lower PR and was still higher on the SERPS than the a supperior page with higher PR and keyword match placement.
My undestanding was that if you shoot to get as high of page rank as possible you will be high on the serps for your keywords. All the popular keywords pages seemed to come up first with pages of high PR about 1 year ago.
Have things changed?
Now, I understand that keywords on the results need to be there and they need to be upfront in the title following one another.
[...]
In fact, I found a site that had poorer keyword placement combined with a lower PR and was still higher on the SERPS than the a supperior page with higher PR and keyword match placement.
It's simply that while PageRank and the placement of keywords in the page title are both important factors in ranking at Google, they are only two of many factors. Link anchor text, as Receptional_Andy said, also plays a role as does text in heading tags, placement, proximity, and density of keywords in the body text, amount of text on the page, and on and on.
So when you say that one site has "poorer keyword placement" than another you're probably making a far too basic comparison of the two.
G.
Any 'single variable' understanding of a highly complex tool such as Google is doomed.
Analysing the variables one by one without isolating them first will not help, except for very broad statements such as "documents with matching titles are sometimes listed better" or "documents with high PageRank are sometimes listed better".
So given that these sites or pages did all of the optimizing to the max and had a much higher PR they still managed to be beaten by another site/page that had a much lower PR and did almost none to the keyword optimizing the other site did. Why?
Take keyword Travel for instance. First listing has lousy keyword optimization but because it is PR8 its the first listing. PR seems to be king most of the time but sometimes PR seems to be pointless according to some keyword results.
I mention this because, if PR is really king, and since getting good PR is not easy It would be very frustrating if I spent a lot of time and money to get high PR only to find out it was all pointless.
Given the above information, you could see that if PR was a very heavy influence, it could be as much as 5%. But what about the other 95%?
Does anyone know what the other 99+ factors are? Title of page? Age of page? Update dates of pages? Length of page? Link text in? Link text out? Alt tags? H tags? Meta tags? Keyword density (and spam cut-off)? Keyword proximity? Bold, italics? Position on page of keywords? Title of other pages in same domain? Number of pages in site that give a result (i.e. number of more pages from this site link)? Number of similar pages found?
And that is just a few possibilities...
rfgdxm1, again yes, low PR sites rise near the top if they are better optimized keyword wise then the others. But how do you explain those that rise to the top but have lower PR and no keyword optimization at all. Say PR6 and PR3.
yes, low PR sites rise near the top if they are better optimized keyword wise then the others. But how do you explain those that rise to the top but have lower PR and no keyword optimization at all. Say PR6 and PR3..
Quite frankly, I've never seen that happen -- a PR3 inexplicably beating a PR6, or something similar (PR6 to PR3 is a pretty big jump). Every time I have seen such an apparent "mystery," closer examination has shown on-page or off-page (link anchor text, for example) elements that explain it.
