Forum Moderators: open
Page Rank is obviously unimportant because I see low PR pages outranking high PR pages all the time.
Rambling opinion:
There is a flaw in this thinking. We cannot equate PR value and ability to rank. A ranking represents how important a page is, relative to the rest of the net, for a specific search query. PR is the overall rating of the relevance of a page as it relates to other similar pages on the Internet. These are very different things, and we shouldn’t confuse them, however related they are.
It’s true that a page with almost no PR value can rank better than a strong PR page. Sometimes this is due to the specificity of the low PR page in relation to the search query; sometimes it’s a function of one variable being overloaded in the low PR page (ie. googlebombing, or some on-page spam technique that sneaks by). Sometimes, as we’ve all seen, Google just ranks things poorly, and instead of studying it to find out why, it’s easier to ignore the exceptions and work within the guidelines of what consistently works. PageRank is important for other reasons, don’t dismiss it because might be more than one hop away from directly affecting the SERPs.
The unimportance of pagerank is discussed a bit, here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Most people starting out linking blindly, then when they learn about the toolbar and PR, they only link to sites with decent PR
Rambling opinion:
The reasons for people doing reciprocal link exchanges can vary widely, but are usually based around two intentions. The first intention is placing a link on a site that has traffic, and may direct some to you through the link. The second, much more relevant reason these days, is because link popularity is a key to success in an engine like Google.
Most people who visit this forum are likely to encounter a post by an emotional SEO advocating one extreme or the other – that the PR of your reciprocal links is either vitally important and requires your utmost attention – or that the PR of your reciprocal links is ignorable and will never affect your rankings directly, so don’t worry about it.
Fortunately it’s the extremes that are important, so it’s good that they are discussed, but a good understanding stems more from learning to achieve some kind of balance, and knowing what to pay attention to. PR is important in your reciprocal links when they are either extremely high PR links, or extremely low PR links.
Doing a link exchange with someone who has a higher PR should boost your own PR for the page doing the exchange. Some would still argue that this increase in PR is useless, but I think the majority accept that it is easier to attain rankings with a higher PR, and more PR on one page seems to increase the relevancy of an entire site, so long as that page is well related and incorporated into the site. SEOs in the know are well aware that if they are linked up with all of the major players in their theme (who, for some strange reason, all have a half-decent PR) they have a good chance of coming out on top. You can argue that it’s the links and other variables that contribute to the rankings, not the PR doing the work, and I would agree, but those variables and your PR are inextricably linked.
Doing a link exchange with someone who has a lower PR than your own should not decrease the relevancy of your site, unless we get into extremes. A site that has a PR of 0 it could have been hit with a Google penalty. This means that the site did something wrong in google’s eyes, and is being penalized for it’s offence. The accepted view of linking with penalized sites runs along these lines: a single reciprocal link with a bad site, or bad neighborhood, should have no affect on your page or PR. A disproportionate number of links on your site to low quality or penalized sites may transfer that penalty to you to some degree. This means that if you’ve linked out to a number of bad neighborhoods, and not enough good neighborhoods, your site will be seen as part of the bad neighborhood and you will inherent the penalty. So it’s really about ratios, which makes sense from Google’s perspective.
Doing a link exchange with someone who has an average PR should not hurt you, and help you a little bit. It’s more about bulk when it comes to low PR reciprocal rinks – there is not set of equivalents but it’s safe to say dozens of incoming PR4 links will only add up to the value of one or two PR6 links. It comes down to personal affect which policy you decide for yourself. For some of my sites I never exchange links with a lower PR – for others anything 3+ is fine. A lot of the time I’m linking with my competition and don’t want to give them more value than they are giving me, so wont exchange links unless the PR is on par. But sometimes I just try to find some other value in the link exchange, beyond the PR of the page of the incoming link. This could include things like anchor text control, or graphical real-estate, or a number of links in exchange for one. Lots of options there.
There is a discussion of quality vs. quantity here [webmasterworld.com...]
In the end it’s important to know the PR of the sites your linking to, but should rarely affect your decision to link, and unless it’s a case of extremes, PR should never be the only deciding variable when you choose who to link to.
Googles revelation of PR is more of a hindrance to SEO than a help
My opinion… this may be true, but it doesn’t mean we should all uninstall the toolbar and start over. The fact of the matter is, PR is here and so is the toolbar. It may not be here forever, but for now, we have to work with it.
Because it exists, when we do our link exchanges it’s something we have to pay attention to, simply because the people we are exchanging links with may pay attention to it.
This means: if you’re doing a reciprocal link exchange campaign on a new site and are getting very poor response rates, it may be because you don’t have a proper page rank established yet, and so your requests are being ignored by the other webmasters.
This makes it quite difficult to get a site off of the ground, if you’re ignored for being new. Thankfully, for a decent site that actually has some content, you can look to directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo for one of your first links, and you might even end up with a nice PR5 to start with. These directories don’t require reciprocation, and pay no attention to PR.
Of course, the way you go about solving a problem depends on your position, resources, and available options. I recently offered the suggestion to someone (with a greyed out PR) that they might want to include a note when they exchange links with other webmasters, stating that their site is new and has yet to be assigned a PR, but should be updated with the next google update. I was told this was an unprofessional solution… but if people are ignoring your link reciprocation requests because of a grey PR which is not a penalty, I’d hazard a guess that explaining the situation intelligently to them should absolve any fears. Otherwise, I know of no ‘professional solution’ to the above situation, unless you have other resources at your disposal. This really only applies to a new site with no PR assigned yet, obviously a site that has recieved a penalty shouldn't go and advertise the fact. But grey-PR can mean a number of things, not necessarily a penalty.
Many of us don’t have this problem because we work as SEOs, and have a slew of fully functioning domains from which to introduce a site to google, without fear of the unknown. Novices may not realize that they possess the same ability, either via a previously indexed personal home-page, or a friends. I recently realized that my ICQ profile page, which I’ve never touched, has been indexed by google and is an easy spot to link out to new sites, or ones I want to keep separate from my other networks.
--
So why did I write all of this down? Because it really bugs me to see people, even if they are pros and have come to their conclusion after years of research, offering advice to a novice to completely ignore PR as it is an unimportant metric. That oversimplification is frustrating.
I honestly pay very little attention to PR, because that’s how much I believe it deserves, but I can’t ignore it. I work within an industry where at any time I may come across a bad neighborhood that exists only for the purposes of hurting their competition. Others will never have to deal with that, it’s industry specific. Since we don’t discuss things from an industry specific perspective at webmasterworld, we might as well try to not give any general advice if it might only apply to one type of industry and not another.
I’m not a PR expert, (and don’t really care to be, I’d rather keep ranking as my expertise;)) so this post is not meant to be a PR knowledge base by any means, there are a million aspects worth discussing that I left out, but where’s the wwworld PR guide? Or the main PR thread to point novices towards to gain an idea of things? (no seriously where is it, I thought there was one but can’t find it – the links in the PR section of the Google Knowledge base are returning 404s) – is it too subjective a topic to have an ‘authoritative’ post?
Right now my own attitude to PR is that I try to acheive a decent PR for every single page on my websites and using that PR as part of the basis for my further work.
Good initiative, fiver
the links in the PR section of the Google Knowledge base are returning 404s
The older posts were moved into the forum archive. In such cases you just need to add "1000" before the forum number so that /forum3/ becomes /forum10003/.
Here are most of the MIA threads from the PageRank section of the Google Knowledge Base.
PageRank Guide [webmasterworld.com]
PageRank? A Number? [webmasterworld.com]
What is a "good" PageRank? [webmasterworld.com]
3 Top Ways To Improve Ranking in Google - Part 1 [webmasterworld.com]
3 Top Ways To Improve Ranking in Google - Part 2 [webmasterworld.com]
How Do You Know If You Are Banned? [webmasterworld.com]
What Has Happened To PageRank This Month? [webmasterworld.com]
Is There A Website With A PageRank 10? [webmasterworld.com]
...it really bugs me to see people, even if they are pros and have come to their conclusion after years of research, offering advice to a novice to completely ignore PR as it is an unimportant metric.
I totally agree. It seems unprofessional for a "pro" to offer such unhelpful advice to a novice. Anyone who claims PR is useless simply has not found a creative way to use it.
I had a site at PR6 for about a year. It dropped to a PR3, and fell in rank from 2-3 place to about 20th. I made no change to the site.
Someone tell me that PR is useless now... it saved me from freaking out and changing my site. Obviously, Google changed the algorithm regarding links, not content.
I live in a heavily populated space in which there are a number of PR8s, fairly large number of PR7s and there are a ton of PR6s. In fact a PR6 is a fairly bad PR and a 5 is a complete disaster. Yet 5s are often atop the serps if the niche of the site is relevant to the search terms. Sometimes you find 8s 4 or more pages into the serps. So PR, while it certainly has its place, isn't the only game in town.
If I were advising a novice (not sure I'm not a total novice myself), I'd explain what PR is and how to go about getting it but I'd follow that up with a discussion about developing good unique content and other important points.
I think Bret has said before that if you follow some simple rules, make a good site with good content and then encourage people to link to you, you will rise in the serps.
I know I put way to much worry behind my PR for many months. I lost lots of sleep about it and basically got nowhere. There was a rescaling and I went to PR7. Then for some reason I went to PR6 but got 20% more google referrals. Then I went back to a 7 but watched my referrals drop 10%.
So to sum up, yes PR is certainly important but it is not the holy grail.
When I'm negotiating a link exchange, the issues I focus on are getting my preferred wording in the link text, and making sure there is a spider-friendly path from their home page to the page my link will be on. I figure if that if we get those two things right, PR will look after itself.
