How is this possible?

PR doesn't affect SERPS?

[dschreib]

I have a site that has a PR4 and still doesn't get ranked in the top 50 for any of its keywords, which aren't very competitve. The pages that Google is listing above it have pageranks of PR2 - PR3. The site hasn't been banned, nor have I participated in any spamming activities. I've just added some new content and a robots.txt file. Does anyone have any idea as to why this might be happening?

[chinkchink]

how are you doing on backlinks? how many? what are the link text other are using to link to you? what are these sites PR?

[ogletree]

Because G has made it more complicated. If it were easy then anyone could do it. I'm glad it's hard. I have less people to compete with. PR does not have much to do with it any longer. It is just one of several things that matter.

[jtbell]

I have a site that has a PR4 and still doesn't get ranked in the top 50 for any of its keywords, which aren't very competitve. The pages that Google is listing above it have pageranks of PR2 - PR3.

How do the pages compare in terms of using the keywords in the body text, page title, and <h1> etc. tags? How do they compare in the anchor text of the backlinks?

[trillianjedi]

Page titles and anchor text inbounds is what will shoot you up the SERPS for non-competitive terms very easily.

TJ

[tomasz]

Well, my site PR6 several pages, over 600 links, in first 5 for allinanchor, allintext, allintitle but not in first 100 pages. Site is only 3 months old which has beeen 301 redirected from another site (over 4 year, just purchased better domain). Nowhere to be found, just hoping they update index sooon!

[Nikke]

Don't trust PageRank alone! Isn't that the lession we are lerning. At least it's the one I'm teaching...

Just to brag a bit, one of my season pages has been up for about a month. PR is 0, zip, null (at least as shown, I know it can have an invisible PR) but it ranks #1 for one of the two-word phrases I'm looking for, and #2 for the other.

If it can be of any comfort, the site it is part of has an evenly spread PR of 4 except for some rare pages (like the index page) that have PR 5.

However, the index page, with it's PR of 5, almost never show up in SERPs. And it isn't meant to. I'm after the two- or three-word phrases for the distinct pages on the site.

[WebMistress]

I don't believe this index is done. I have a site that is 2 years old with 1700 good keyword backlinks, but not all the same, backlinks from good pages, which always kept me in the #1 or #2 position. I am down now too. Everytime a new update happens, I do drop temporarily because I have 2 pages that both rank high for a 2-keyword phrase (completely different content on each page), and until google completes the index, my site always drops, but you can see by adding &filter=0 at the end of the url in the goole seach where my site should be and does always end up at the end of an index, suggesting it is seeing my 2 pages as dulicate content or something. It always returns, and it will this time...it just ain't over until the fat lady sings. As much as I have been through this so many times, I too get scared, but I know that every single time it does this I come back up, which you'd think would teach me to just hang in there...easier said than done! But to all of you who are down and it just doesn't make any sense that you are down, just hang in there!

[div01]

dschreib,

How old is your site?

[Nikke]

by adding &filter=0 at the end of the url in the goole seach

I'm not sure what that command does to you, but when I use it I see 30 odd pages from my site holding the 30 odd first positions. That's what happens at Google.com

Using google.se, we're number 5 without filter=0 and number 8 with it... (Three extra pages for the number one site are displayed).

But I thing you're right. There are things going on every day.

[ogletree]

Try reading this

[webmasterworld.com...]

[dschreib]

Wow, thanks for the replies. Here are some answers to your questions:

-- The site is about 1.5 y/o
-- I think I need to increase the backlinks, but I thought that ppl on here decided that this wasn't the most important issue
-- The site definitely needs more websites with higher PR linking to it, but with such non-competitive keywords, shouldn't this be a moot point?
-- It's funny actually - some of the pages that rank higher on the SERPS than this page are directory pages, otherwise their amateur pages with personal information that happen to contain my keyword
-- TJ: page titles and anchor text inbounds? got the title's taken care of, but what's important in the anchor text?

We've got good content on the entire site that takes into account h1 tags, titles, and keyword density, but haven't done the alt image text or the tools that would make G think it's over-optimized. very confusing.

thanks for the advice!
Dan

[Nikke]

anchor text inbounds

The phrase other sites use in the link. If your site is about purple widgets you want those two words in the link: <a href="http://yoursite.com">purple widgets</a>.

You don't want <a href="http://yoursite.com">stupid gadgets</a>, or <a href="http://yoursite.com">http://yoursite.com</a>

Now, unless you are doing link exchanges, it's somewhat hard to dictate what anchor text other sites will use. And still a link is better than no link...

[MikeNoLastName]

>The phrase other sites use in the link. If your site >is about purple widgets you want those two words in >the link: <a href="http://yoursite.com">purple >widgets</a>.

Since you mentioned it, I have a question on this exact thing. If my aim to is rank high under "purple widgets", but my well known company name and site title happens to be "The Original Purple Widgets Maker" would
<a href="http://yoursite.com">The Original Purple Widgets Maker</a> be just as effective as <a href="http://yoursite.com">purple widgets</a> or will that be detrimental (e.g. dilution of terms?) in the long run?
Internally I try to link as often as possible to the home page using "purple widgets", but it's almost impossible to get others to link that way when they prefer to copy the site title and there are many. many other purple widget sellers out there.
Right now our pages rank in positions 1 thru 5 for "The Original Purple Widgets Maker" but only one ranks around 20 for "purple widgets".

[steveb]

"be just as effective"

No. Dilution, or a dropoff of importance from word one to word two to word three, whatever, the extra words hurt. In other words, huge strings of keywords linked together will not "work".