Links for ranking and PR

[member22]

Hello,

I do have website that has about 350 links and a PR of 4. A competitor of mine does have a PR of 4 and about 1300 links !

what I don't understand they rank for a keywords that i can't rank for ? I have perfect anchor text, links, website design for seo etc...

Could the reason why I am not ranking be the fact that i don't have enough links ? even though most of his links are of N/A PR ?

In other words does it help to have PR of 0 links for ranking ? it seems that google doesn't look at the PR for ranking but mostly the number of links ? is that the way google works ?

Thanks,

[tedster]

Don't change your understanding of PR. The number of backlinks, on its own, is not that important and you're correct that the quality of those links is. I've seen websites with a few hundred backlinks outrank others with thousands and thousands.

You say "I have perfect anchor text, links, website design for seo." Those areas are very complex at Google and the reason for being outranked may be in those details. Or it may be in many other on-page or on-site factors, including semantic variation in your written content. Your competition may have some strong domains redirecting to theirs. None of use has the algo perfectly figured out.

[member22]

Hi Tesdster,

Thanks for the reply but what do you mean but semantic variation in the written content ? is that bad to use synonyms of the main keyword I want to be ranked on ?

Thanks,

[tedster]

By semantic variation, I mean two things:

1. Synonyms
A normal amount of synonym usage is natural and expected. If there is very little or none, then Google's algo may see the page as "over-optimized".

2. Co-occuring words and phrases
More than just synonyms, Information Retrieval today looks at co-ocurring words and phrases. These are not synonyms, but other words and phrases, some of which are naturally expected to appear in content about the main keywords. For example, content about "doctor" might naturally include some words and phrases like "disease", "disease prevention", "doctor's office", "check-up" "presecription" and so on.

An important word in that second section is "some". If the content has either way too many co-occurring terms or way too few, Google's algorithms will notice this and may penalize the page. Google uses an approach to this form of Semantic IR that they call "phrase based indexing" and we discussed it here when they first filed for size phrased-based indexing patents [webmasterworld.com] in 2006.

Google has an immense amount of data and measures what the standard, expected amount of variation is around many keywords. Some deviation from the norm is expected in each case and a helathy semantic variation can help rankings. But if a page goes too far, it might have all kinds of ranking demotions, from small to quite major.