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It has not affected the results for that page in the SERPS and in fact, it is now beating a PR5 index page (for a competitive phrase) where I used to be number 4 and am now #3. The PR5 page used to be number #3 and is now #4. They have more links than I do and neither of us has changed a thing on our index pages.
Go figure!
Beachboy, you just summed up about half of the last 7,000 threads:).
I've been contemplating heini's point for a while ("low PR, like 2 or 3, can outperform PR4 pages easily for phrases"). My feeling (purely qualitative) is that it's much harder for a PR5 to outperform a PR7 than it is for a PR2 to outperform a PR4.
Could it be that the curve for the PR weighting is different from the curve for the Toolbar scale?
I've been contemplating heini's point for a while ("low PR, like 2 or 3, can outperform PR4 pages easily for phrases"). My feeling (purely qualitative) is that it's much harder for a PR5 to outperform a PR7 than it is for a PR2 to outperform a PR4.Could it be that the curve for the PR weighting is different from the curve for the Toolbar scale?
As I have observed PR5 do beat out PR7's often (just maybe not as often as lower scaled pages)
I would tend to believe that the sheer number of unique "votes" would play a part in this as well.
1000 links from lower PR pages creating a PR5 would be a far more difficult to manipulate than a page at PR7 received from 20 links, thus more valuable to google users.
Maybe if you have the right anchortext in plenty of reasonable PageRank incoming links then the 'relevance' weight doesn't need on-page factors so much.
Taken to a logical extreme, a relevant PR2 page will outrank an irrelevant PR10 page. If the search is about red widgets and your page is about green gizmos, in a competitive environment, PageRank isn't going to get it up there.
I think there's plenty of room for on-site optimization. Simply tuning the proximity of words (that make up a phrase) in your title or on a page can have a huge effect in competitive rankings. All other things being equal, though, high PR and relevant incoming links (coming from high PR sites) make your job a lot easier.
I agree with high pr and incoming links are important however I will sticky mail you with my pr4 page and the pr8 page. I am pretty amazed that my page is higher ranked. Interested in your comments.
doc - It really is a case of red widgets and green gizmos here.
You have a title, some headings with good page position, and global text nav links pointing to your page, and they all contain the target phrase in exact or close to exact matches. The competing page doesn't. To the human mind, the competing page is associated with the same subject, but it doesn't really feature the target phrase.
Search engines are very literal. They look only at specific text content... Google doesn't support "stemming" (adjusting for singular and plurals and other variants of the same word)... and no engine can yet translate "foreign gizmo manufacturers" into "international widgets."
The competing page does have each of the words in the phrase somewhere on the page, and I wouldn't be surprised (but I didn't check) if it had some incoming links that contained one of the words... but it's really only because of its high PageRank that it ranks for the phrase at all. That is the advantage that high PageRank gives. If that were a PageRank 4 or 5 page, maybe even a 6, I doubt you'd find it in the top 50.
Very, very simplified. Imagine that your position at Goggle is made up of two factors, on page stuff [titles, text etc] and off page factors, lets just imagine the only off page factor is PageRank itself. Lets spilt the two factors in half, 100 points each, the aim is to score 200.
Lets say that a PR1 is worth 10 points and PR10 100 points.
Your site which targets the phrase "blue widgets" is a masterpiece of on page optimisation, you score the maximum 100 points for that. Your PR is 5, hence 50 points. Total score 150pts.
Your competitor is not quite as good as you at on page optimisation, he only scores 70 points for on page stuff. He is a PR9 and hence scores 160pts, you lose.
Taken to extremes, if you have a PR0 the most you can ever score is 100. It doesn't matter how good your traditional/on page optimisation is, you will probably be buried even for your unique company name.
Don't take a knife to a gun fight.
blue widget [google.com] : 36 200 results
"blue widget" [google.com] : 748 results
This way, you get all the funnies out of the way and can compare oranges with... tangerines.
allintitle: "blue widget" [google.com]
Yes... and in fact all of the Google Advanced Search options provide clues and should be studied, both with the default all-the-words search and with the exact phrase, when evaluating why pages rank.
If doc does a search for allinanchor: "international widgets," he'll see that the competing PR8 page still ranks behind him, and that it also has the exact phrase pointing to the page. This (in conjunction with Page Rank) is probably the main reason the PR8 page is ranking for the phrase.
The cache can also be a useful tool for seeing terms pointing to a page, but it works only when the terms don't appear on the page.
On most comparisons, doc is several places ahead of his PR8 competitor (who has a much less focussed page than he does). With allintitle, though, his competitor doesn't rank at all.
