PR an Explanation

[wilderness]

My participation at Webmaster World is confined to the Search Engine Spider Identification forum.
That choice is just a matter of priorities.

Is it possible somebody could explain to me the comparison or definition between PR# and what is actually returned is search results?
If my page(s) are #1 on SE results than, is the PR relavant and what is that PR?
I believe I had the toolbar which offered PR installed at one time and removed it almost immediately. Don't recall why.

Is the SE Lukol relavant for the same PR's?

Any URL's which explain these issues would do just as well.
Thanks in advance
Don

[seofreak]

PR=pagerank, which is measured on a scale of 0 to 10 ..

If there are 2 sites related to 'brown leather shoes' and 1 has a PR5 and the other PR6 .. depending on the keyword used to search for brown leather shoes .. PR6 site will generally will be ranked above compared to the PR5 site.

However, the case may be opposite if the search term is used in the title tag of PR5 site and not on PR6 site or PR5 site has made more use of that keyword on the page than the PR6 site ..

Best way to observe is search at google and open the sites up to compare

[doc_z]

PR is a kind of importance and it is one (important) factor for the search results. However, there are a number of others: anchor text, title, text (position, density) and so on. Of course, the exact ingredients of the ranking algorithm are not known. Pages with high PR do better in the search results, but optimizing the on-page components and the anchor text (probably the most important point) you can outrank higher PR pages.

While the ranking algorithm is unknown, the PR algorithm is well known. The easiest way to describe it, is the possibility of a 'random surfer' to visit your page. The higher the probability to visit a page, the higher the PR. Therefore, more incoming links (especially from high PR pages) increase your PR, because it increases the probability of the random surfer to visit your page. (Since in pratice there are dead ends on the internet, the 'random surfer' follows with probability 85% a link of his current page or visits with a probability of 15% randomly an other page.)

The ToolbarPR (which is the only possibility to get a guess of the PR) is an interger value which is related to the real PR on a log scale, e.g.
real PR <-> ToolbarPR
<1 : 0
1-10 : 1
10-100 : 2
...

If you are intersted in more details, you will find a good overview on Markus homepage (given in his profile).

[wilderness]

Thanks for the replies and info.
I went throught the FAQ afterwards.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Found some good links there however plenty of dead-forum links as well.