How much do you care about PR when targeting a keyword ?

[Michael Nguyen]

Been learning SEO for a while now.

Back then, assessing PR of competing sites was be all and end all.

Month or two back it was about assessing PR with backlinks.

Now I come to think that PR is a useless metric. It's the backlinks that are worth assessing.

No wonder you might see a site with PR of 2 sitting higher than a site with PR of 4.

Discuss

Michael

[dburk]

Hi Michael,

You ask an interesting question. It seems obvious to me that PR by itself does not play a significant role in ranking a page. This is easily confirmed by analyzing the SERP.

The PR of a competing webpage represents the relative number of direct and indirect backlinks to that page. If some or most of those backlinks are not optimized for the keyword in question, does that page accrue SERP ranking value from those irrelevant backlinks? All evidence I have seen suggest that they do not, therefore it seems unlikely that PR is a reliable factor in assessing your competition for a particular keyword.

I suspect that the relevance of the backlinks to your competitor's page is essential to passing value to their page. If this wasn't true then you would see similar pages ranked precisely in order of their PR. Based on these observations I would conclude PR is not a reliable metric in assessing the strength of your competitor's page, but perhaps plays a partial role in influencing the value of relevant backlinks.

From what I can see PR is passed to a page regardless of whether the inbound links are relevant or not, however the page receiving the inbound link does not benefit in SERP rankings unless that inbound link has at least some relevance.

The real question in my mind is how much does the relevance of a backlink to a page influence the SERPs. It's clear to me that Google applies some kind of a relevancy score to a page for each keyword in order to sort the pages on the SERP. If this relevancy score is already calculated, wouldn't it be practical to use this same relevancy score as a factor in assigning the value of a backlink for a particular keyword?

[Niche]

I wuldn't say PR is entirely useless. it is good for measuring how far you have come. But in the grand scheme of SERPs position and getting traffic, perhaps it is not as important as we previously believed.
It really nowis about quality backlinks and your content. Lately I have been paying more attention to my content and Sites seem to be doing better

[debra]

Actually, since it's conception, I never looked at PR as a factor unless I had to compete with the IM industry directly.

It's all about market reach. Getting in front of your buying customers and it's always been that way. I use demographics to determine where my content needs to show up. Follow the tracks of your customer.

[Hyaku_Man]

I agree it's the backlinks, and on-site SEO. I have PR 0 sites ranking above PR3 and even PR4 sites.

I only really pay attention to PR when I'm targeting sites for backlinks. Even then I don't know how meaningful it is, but I take it as a rough guideline of how much link juice I'll get.

[Michael Nguyen]

Thank you for the replys. Even though I mentioned that PR being useless, I should have noted down that theres a point when it becomes useless. Alot of my decisions is based on GUT feel aswell (my mentor taught me this) and not just to do with metrics.

Sometimes you just know that a results can be beat, eg Amazon result with PR3 and 5 backlinks can easily be beat.

I'm in the physical product sector of affiliate marketing and there is less competition SEO wise. All my sites at one point have been on first page of Google and given time they will go to number 1.

[Fernando Veloso]

I do not care about page rank. Never. In fact, i get kind of upset when my followers keep on talking about it... cause it's so damn useless if you know what you're doing.

Psst, i have this conspiracy theory... PageRank and NoFollow tag was ONLY developed to track webmasters, gather their data and confuse them with new changes.

Just my 2 cents.



Fernando

[james kertley]

Site has PR is good but When I target keywords then I take little care for PR.

[Intrepreneur]

Here's my checklist

Top 10 results

1. Are there any web 2.0 properites - if there is I'm an instant winner - no need to check the rest of the list.

2. No web 2.0 properties - check the backlinks, and strength of the site and the content (exceed the content and start backlinking to it)

Job done.

[stevendennis]

page rank relates to no of backlinks and outbound links or some other constant factors.if your site is ranking well then your sites traffic volume will boosts up easily...page ranks doesn't matter then at all...