What is more important? Competition numbers or PR?

[carlos123]

I know both should be weighed but between the two which is more important?

The reason I am asking is that I have settled on a strategy to help me save time when looking for potential keyword phrases to build sites around.

Basically I look at the PR of the top 4 site pages that appear on the 1st page of Google. In general...if the first site page is a PR of 4 or above I go on to the next keyword phrase unless the average PR of the first 4 is below 3 in which case I do more evaluating of the keyword phrase.

The next thing I look at is the traffic (both LSV and MSV) and the ECPC (estimated cost per click from Adwords) running it through a formula I devised to help me determine the profit potential of the traffic and the ECPC.

I then follow with a look at the competition count based on a search of the keyword phrase in quotes.

Lastly I look at the actual top pages and how many links they have coming in and what kind of quality those links might be.

What I am wondering about is the relative importance of PR vs Competion count as indicated above?

Would you consider the competition count to be more important or less than PR? Why or why not?

The reason I have elevated PR above the Competition count is that I have noticed a fair number of very high Competion phrases which have top ranking site pages which have real low PR's and are beatable on that basis alone if no other.

Thoughts anyone?

Carlos

[dburk]

Hi Carlos,

Why do you think that PR is important? PR only matters when you are building backlinks.

PR is just relative link popularity, It doesn't tell you if any of their links are even remotely relevant to your targeted keyword. So a PR 6 page at the top of the search result could be there because there are almost no other pages that are optimized for the keyword including that page.

[carlos123]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi Carlos,

Why do you think that PR is important? PR only matters when you are building backlinks.

I am still learning Don but it seems that generally speaking a higher PR is a site which is tougher to beat in the rankings. John (XFactor) for example does not generally recommend going after anything above PR4. Mind you John's word is certainly not the final say so on all this but I have heard similar things from other successful Adsense folks.

Another one for example does not go into a keyword phrase unless the average of the top ten site pages that show up in page 1 of the SERPs is 3 or less.

Generally speaking I think most would agree that any site with a PR7 or above is not worth going after unless one is prepared to spend a fair bit of time building quality backlinks and otherwise.

I guess what I am saying is that my strategy at present is to focus mainly on sites that are PR3 or less as a way for me to learn as I go without requiring too much effort on my part to beat.

Do you think PR is of no importance at all Don as a criteria to consider in picking keyword phrases to focus on?

PR is just relative link popularity, It doesn't tell you if any of their links are even remotely relevant to your targeted keyword.

Correct me if I am wrong Don but it is my understanding that PR is not just about link popularity but also about whether incoming links have the keyword phrase in their anchor text (i.e. link quality) and the PR of the sites that are linking to mine.

So a PR 6 page at the top of the search result could be there because there are almost no other pages that are optimized for the keyword including that page.

I am bit confused by this last statement Don. Are you saying that PR is absolutely irrelevant to site ranking in the SERP's? I have certainly seen plenty of lower ranked PR sites beating out higher ranked one's.

I guess I am left wondering too if you think the competitive count is any better than PR as an indication of how hard it will be to beat a top ranking page?

The way I look at it is that my true competition is what shows up in the top ten positions. So there has to be a way to quickly weed out keyword phrases based on something in the top ten. I can't think of a better indicator or guide to help me narrow the playing field of keyword phrases down and somewhat logically so than PR.

I mean a keyword phrase might show a competitive count of hundreds of thousands of site pages but if the top ten sites are PR0, PR1, and PR2's it would seem that the hundreds of thousands of "competitors" don't even matter matter.

The problem I am bumping into with respect to using the competion count as such an indicator or guide is that I am bumping into quite a few cases where the competition count is absolutely meaningless as an indication of true competitiveness. Where there may be high competition, very high competition even, but where many of the top site pages that appear are junk.

The bad pages usually have low PR's so putting two and two together it would seem that PR is a better guide to competitiveness than the wildly swinging competitive count...which doesn't seem to mean much of anything beyond the first page of SERPs.

Carlos

[SEOArbiter]

It sounds like you are primarily doing the analysis for SEO purposes.

If so, take the URL for the top sites, and throw it into yahoo site explorer, and change the options to show links for that specific URL (not the entire domain name).

I would also use majestic SEO for complete link numbers.

Forget about the rest of the stuff. As dburk mentioned, page rank is only relative to how valuable that link is on that specific page. Sites are NOT ordered or ranked in order of page rank.

[jasonmorgan]

PR is just relative link popularity, It doesn't tell you if any of their links are even remotely relevant to your targeted keyword. So a PR 6 page at the top of the search result could be there because there are almost no other pages that are optimized for the keyword including that page.

exactly,

page rank is over rated. If page rank were so important for search engine ranking then the same PR 9 sites would rank #1-10 for everything.

Like dburk said.

Check the competitions site and backlinks, are they even after those keywords? Most of us rank #1 for some obscure keyword or phrase, not because we want too but just by chance.

my site optimized for 'blue widgets' may rank #99 for 'blue widgets' because it's a very competitive keyword but for some odd reason I'll rank #1 for 'glow in the dark blue widgets', only because nobody else wants it and I happen to have a blog post about 'glow in the dark blue widgets'.

I do believe that the more authority a site has, it's umbrella of overall ranking strength for additional long-tail keywords grows. I've seen this first hand with my own site. But those additional long-tail keywords aren't very strong and can be knocked out fairly easy.

I just checked a single word keyword I'm gunning after... #1, PR 4 (a major dating site) #2, PR 3 (a blog) #3, PR 5 (wikipedia) #4, PR 4 (a directory) #5, PR 3 (a blog) #6, PR 4 (online newspaper article) and PR's 4, 3, 1, 3, 4 finish off the top 10.

As you can see, PR isn't everything when it comes to ranking. A PR 3 site is beating a PR 5 and four PR 4 sites. And a PR 1 is beating a PR 3 and 4 site and every webmaster for those sites except wikipedia and the newspaper are competing for the same keyword. wikipeida and the newspaper actually have honest natural backlinks due to great content and they rank so well because both site have very high authority in googles eyes.

[jasonmorgan]

PR is not just about link popularity but also about whether incoming links have the keyword phrase in their anchor text

this is incorrect.

If you were to link a bunch of high pr sites to a default wordpress install with no content that site would gain page rank but it wouldn't rank for anything in the search engines, maybe 'hello world' but that's is about it.

[carlos123]

This thread has been very informative. I think I need to rethink my strategy.

Although I have known that PR is not the basis for SERP positioning, that's quite obvious, it seems to be a factor in determining the competitiveness of a niche with respect to how easy it will be to beat the top sites.

Would you all agree with that?

Unfortunately the quality of incoming links and how many there are is just as fickle as a determiner of competitiveness as PR seems to be. I have seen plenty of instances where sites with over a thousand or more incoming links are lower in SERP position than sites with almost no links at all.

I guess we are back to guessing. But I do hope to learn to guess a bit better.

So between the two criteria of competitive numbers and PR to determine whether one niche is more truly competitive than another is the competitive number of more importance than PR?

Please note that I am not asking if either criteria explains page positioning more than the other. Neither one seems to explain that very adequately due to the many times sites outrank each other for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with either PR or the number or quality of links coming in.

Which of these two criteria, PR or the competitive number which shows up in Google when searching for a key phrase in quotes, is a better indicator of how easy it will be to be one of the top ten site pages that appear?

Not a perfect indicator. Just a better one?

If you all could pick one or the other but not both...which one would you pick as a better guide to competitiveness? And why? I mean what is the logic behind your choice?

Carlos

[FredJones]

Originally Posted by carlos123

I am still learning Don but it seems that generally speaking a higher PR is a site which is tougher to beat in the rankings. John (XFactor) for example does not generally recommend going after anything above PR4. Mind you John's word is certainly not the final say so on all this but I have heard similar things from other successful Adsense folks.

Another one for example does not go into a keyword phrase unless the average of the top ten site pages that show up in page 1 of the SERPs is 3 or less.

Generally speaking I think most would agree that any site with a PR7 or above is not worth going after unless one is prepared to spend a fair bit of time building quality backlinks and otherwise.

Lo,l, you are right. I actually have beaten PR-8 and PR-9 sites though with my PR-6 site for some good target keywords. And I have been beaten by another PR-8 site for the same keyword and a PR-6 site too. So, the bottomline is that go after some page with a higher PR only if your own PR is not too much lower.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by carlos123

This thread has been very informative. I think I need to rethink my strategy.

Although I have known that PR is not the basis for SERP positioning, that's quite obvious, it seems to be a factor in determining the competitiveness of a niche with respect to how easy it will be to beat the top sites.

Would you all agree with that?

Hi Carlos,

Sorry, I cannot agree. PR is the relative number of direct or indirect links to a page represented in a logarithmic scale. There is absolutely nothing in the number that indicates which keyword those backlinks are optimized for, if they are all optimized for a different keyword than the one you are targeting then that page and that niche may be an easy target.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Unfortunately the quality of incoming links and how many there are is just as fickle as a determiner of competitiveness as PR seems to be. I have seen plenty of instances where sites with over a thousand or more incoming links are lower in SERP position than sites with almost no links at all.

I guess we are back to guessing. But I do hope to learn to guess a bit better.

Just because a number is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important. You don't have to guess, it's just a lot more work to get at the meaningful data. To be fair, we can only guess at the precise weighting of each factor, but when we have a great deal of comparative data we can be fairly accurate in our guesstimates.

Originally Posted by carlos123

So between the two criteria of competitive numbers and PR to determine whether one niche is more truly competitive than another is the competitive number of more importance than PR?

Please note that I am not asking if either criteria explains page positioning more than the other. Neither one seems to explain that very adequately due to the many times sites outrank each other for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with either PR or the number or quality of links coming in.

Which of these two criteria, PR or the competitive number which shows up in Google when searching for a key phrase in quotes, is a better indicator of how easy it will be to be one of the top ten site pages that appear?

Not a perfect indicator. Just a better one?

If you all could pick one or the other but not both...which one would you pick as a better guide to competitiveness? And why? I mean what is the logic behind your choice?

Carlos

The answer is neither one.

The PR is meaningless in this context, ignore it. The number of pages returned for a search using quotes gives you a general ideal of how many pages you will be competing with and gives you absolutely no indication of how strong that competition will be. The only practical use for this number is to narrow the scope of your research.

Ultimately you won't get much traffic unless you can get onto the first page of results for your keyword. You need to focus your research on figuring out what it will take to beat the pages listed on page 1 of results. Neither the PR nor the number of competing pages can be useful for this phase of your research.

To determine how difficult it will be to get onto page #1 of results for your keyword you just need to focus on the page that currently holds the #10 position, if you can beat them you are on page #1.

There are over 200 factors that are used to decide the ranking position for listings on the SERP. You can narrow your focus to the factors that are known to carry the most weight in ranking, these include a number of on-page factors as well as total link value from both internal and external inbound links.

Some of those inbound links have virtually no value, so you have to look at each individual inbound link and estimate its' value. This is no easy task and that is why you may want to narrow the scope of your research before you commit the time to do more in depth research. To save time many people just scan the backlinks to get a general ideal of the strength, perhaps rating it on a scale of 1-5 or something like that.

Just remember not all backlinks are optimized for your keyword, and even if they are, there are other factors they give each backlink more or less weight in SE's scoring.

[jasonmorgan]

I understand your obsession with page rank, it's a ranking, which is easy understand. The higher the rank, the better a page must be.

But,

Page rank has very little to nothing to do with search engine rankings.

Page rank is simply a popularity formula created by google and used only by google. X page rank + Y page rank = Z page rank. In theory, you could build up a blank page's rank just by getting enough high PR backlinks to it.

I do believe that if a site does have a high page rank then obviously google sees that site as being important or having more authority, which helps boost that sites overall search engine rankings, but, that extra boost is very vulnerable to competition. Going back to the formula, google may think a site is important, hence the high page rank, but not really know what the site is important for. If a better site comes along it's going to pass it by.

Page rank is often misrepresented by individuals trying to con naive webmasters for various reasons... generally to make money of them. Selling page ranked sites for high amounts of money pitching that page rank means everything. Same goes for link sellers.

The reason why people tell newer webmasters not to compete with high PR pages is generally, if a page has some page rank then the site has something going 'right' for it. It would be easier for a newer webmaster to target less competitive keywords while they get their feet wet.

Also, if a page has a high page rank, one would expect that whoever is running that site knows what they are doing, which could lead to strong search engine ranking competition, but this is not always the case.

SEO and search engine ranking is very simple, yet can be very complicated.

I think most people would agree that the number 1 thing that is going to make a difference with your search engine ranking is the quality / amount of backlinks and the anchor text. Onsite SEO is helpful and quality content is a nice touch but without backlinks you'll always be at the bottom of the list. Beyond that it's the vague world of everything and anything else that could effect search engine rankings from domain age and age of backlinks to is a <blokequote> more important than an <h2> tag or bounce rate and if organic search engine traffic helps rankings... who knows.

I haven't checked but I would assume the competition for 'viagra' is pretty fierce... spot #5 is a PR 1 site. I also checked 'sex', the #1 spot is PR 5 over a few 6's and 7's.

I'd just pick something and go for it... your going to learn, success or fail. See where your site lands and take it from there. You'll figure stuff out and it'll all start to click once you get an idea of what is working and what's not.

To be honest, I just look for keywords that get a fairly high amount of searches and pound away at it.

Being #1 is nice and a high page rank is cool for bragging to other webmasters about but as long as I'm getting traffic and making money that is all that really matters at the end of the day.

does anyone see my cool signature? just curious.

[carlos123]

Originally Posted by dburk

Sorry, I cannot agree. PR is the relative number of direct or indirect links to a page represented in a logarithmic scale. There is absolutely nothing in the number that indicates which keyword those backlinks are optimized for, if they are all optimized for a different keyword than the one you are targeting then that page and that niche may be an easy target.

Doesn't PR take into account the quality of anchor text surrounding those incoming links? As to whether the anchor text is relevant to the keyword phrase being considered?

Why do people who have been at this Adsense thing a lot longer than me seem to do quite well when taking into account the PR of the top ten sites, dividing by ten, and then going for keyword phrases that end up being an average of less than 3.

Although they take into account a lot more than that...for some this forms a very important basis of selection respecting who they will compete against. If this basis was not a valid basis at all then they would not be doing so well with it. I mean a basis of using PR as a competitive indicator.

Are they lying? I mean if they are doing well using such a basis (to a large degree) to easily and quickly determine competitiveness is there not something to the idea that PR can be a reasonably quick gauge of competitiveness?

Just because a number is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important.

Agreed but that fact doesn't mean that any number is as valuable for determining competitiveness as any other either. I guess I am hoping that some numbers are more indicative of competitiveness than others in a relative sense. I think that generally speaking this relativeness can give us value and make it easier for us to determine competitiveness of a niche.

For example if searching for a keyword phrase in quotes in Google turns up a number of sites as 1,000,000 and searching on another phrase turns up only 1,000 I think it is reasonable accurate to say that the former key phrase will be much more competitive than the latter.

So it seems to me that this number, whether 1,000,000 or 1,000 has value (or importance) for helping us determine competitiveness.

Would you agree with that?

You don't have to guess, it's just a lot more work to get at the meaningful data. To be fair, we can only guess at the precise weighting of each factor, but when we have a great deal of comparative data we can be fairly accurate in our guesstimates.

Is not the comparative data comprised mostly of numbers? PR numbers, competition count numbers, numbers of incoming links, position in the SERP's, SOC numbers, LSV numbers, MSV numbers, ECPC numbers, and so forth?

I am trying to discern the relative importance of some of these numbers, in the case of this thread between competition number of sites and PR, to better allow me to focus on those numbers that might be more important to consider with respect to the competitiveness of a niche.

I realize that none of these numbers are foolproof indicators but I do believe that some are more important than others.

Would you not agree with that Don?

The PR is meaningless in this context, ignore it. The number of pages returned for a search using quotes gives you a general ideal of how many pages you will be competing with and gives you absolutely no indication of how strong that competition will be. The only practical use for this number is to narrow the scope of your research.

Hmm...if it does not give any indication of competitiveness at all why use it as a number to help us narrow the scope of our research? Why not just...well...pick keyword phrases out of a hat and continue our research from there?

The fact is I will only be competing with the top ten pages in the SERP's. If the number of sites returned for a given keyword phrase is meaningless as a quick and relatively easy measure of the competitiveness of the sites that may appear in the top ten for a given keyword phrase then it would seem that we should just completely discount that number.

Again why bother with that number at all if as you say, it has no value with respect to whether the top ten sites will be more or less competitive?

Ultimately you won't get much traffic unless you can get onto the first page of results for your keyword. You need to focus your research on figuring out what it will take to beat the pages listed on page 1 of results. Neither the PR nor the number of competing pages can be useful for this phase of your research.

Agreed Don at least in principle. What I am saying is that number of pages that show up in Google and the PR....seem to most definitely be....indicators of competitiveness to some degree. Of how tough it will be to beat the top ten pages that show up in the SERP's.

Certainly looking at each of the top ten pages in question is much better at determining actual competitiveness but part of that competitiveness is reflected in the PR value in that sites which are not very competitive are likely to have little or no PR (links from sites with authority, quality incoming links)...I mean after they have at least been around for a while.

Because of that I am still leaning in the direction of looking at PR as an indicator of competitiveness. Not a foolproof indicator. Just an indicator to help me narrow the field of keywords down in a better way that using the competitive number that shows up in Google.

To determine how difficult it will be to get onto page #1 of results for your keyword you just need to focus on the page that currently holds the #10 position, if you can beat them you are on page #1.

A valid method. I personally prefer looking at only the top 4. If I think I can beat one of them I move forward. If I can't? I don't bother and move on to another keyword.

There are over 200 factors that are used to decide the ranking position for listings on the SERP. You can narrow your focus to the factors that are known to carry the most weight in ranking, these include a number of on-page factors as well as total link value from both internal and external inbound links.

Is not the total link value reflected in the PR? If that is the case...is not PR reflective of competitiveness to some degree? A degree that might prove useful for quickly determining the competitiveness of a keyword phrase? Not in a foolproof way but sufficient to help us weed out keyword phrases that are highly competitive from those that are not?

Some of those inbound links have virtually no value, so you have to look at each individual inbound link and estimate its' value. This is no easy task and that is why you may want to narrow the scope of your research before you commit the time to do more in depth research. To save time many people just scan the backlinks to get a general ideal of the strength, perhaps rating it on a scale of 1-5 or something like that.

Doesn't the PR formula...at least the one let out by Google years ago...take into account the quality of inbound links to a page to some degree? Giving greater weight to authority sites with higher PR than othewise?

If that is so...could we not use PR as a rough but somewhat useful criteria to help us determine link strength competitiveness between different sites?

Carlos

[carlos123]

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

I understand your obsession with page rank, it's a ranking, which is easy understand. The higher the rank, the better a page must be.

It is not so much that I have an obsession with it Jason...it is that I see some value to using it as a rough but useful indicator of competitiveness to help me narrow the keyword phrases to focus on.

Page rank has very little to nothing to do with search engine rankings.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that Jason after thinking about it some more. I mean if PR reflects the number and strength of inbound links does Google not take into account the number and strength of inbound links when ranking pages in the SERP's?

Page rank is simply a popularity formula created by google and used only by google. X page rank + Y page rank = Z page rank. In theory, you could build up a blank page's rank just by getting enough high PR backlinks to it.

Well then...in theory...and much of this is indeed theoretical...could we not correctly say that PR is then indicative of the strength of a page with regard to the number and quality of it's incoming links?

If that is so could we not then say that PR is an indicator of competitiveness between any two pages? At least as far as inbound link number and strength are concerned.

And if that is so...could we not then say that PR is a useful indicator of overall competitiveness in a niche? When looking at the top ten sites that appears in the SERP's?

I do believe that if a site does have a high page rank then obviously google sees that site as being important or having more authority, which helps boost that sites overall search engine rankings,

So PR is then indicative of competitiveness? At least with regard to whether one site is seen by Google as deserving a higher ranking than another? I mean in general since Google obviously takes into account far more than PR.

but, that extra boost is very vulnerable to competition.

Of course.

The reason why people tell newer webmasters not to compete with high PR pages is generally, if a page has some page rank then the site has something going 'right' for it. It would be easier for a newer webmaster to target less competitive keywords while they get their feet wet.

Agreed. In view of that, for my purposes as a newer Adsense person is not PR a useful tool to help me determine which keyword phrases might be worth building sites around? Not exclusively mind you but as part of the batch of criteria that I consider.

Also, if a page has a high page rank, one would expect that whoever is running that site knows what they are doing, which could lead to strong search engine ranking competition, but this is not always the case.

Agreed that this is not always the case but again for my purposes is not PR a useful indicator of competitiveness? In this case of the very real possibility that whoever is running the site knows what they are doing and will make for stronger competition (assuming they have at least a PR of 4 or above)?

I think most people would agree that the number 1 thing that is going to make a difference with your search engine ranking is the quality / amount of backlinks and the anchor text.

Doesn't PR reflect that to some degree? Is that is so is it not a great and quick indicator of how competitive a niche will be? In the sense that a niche filled with high PR sites is probably too competitive to get into vs one where all the sites have PR's less than say...3 (2, 1, or 0's being even better)?

I haven't checked but I would assume the competition for 'viagra' is pretty fierce... spot #5 is a PR 1 site. I also checked 'sex', the #1 spot is PR 5 over a few 6's and 7's.

Which goes to show that the PR of a particular site may not be all that indicative of competitiveness but if you take the PR of the top ten sites and divide by 10 it seems to me that you will arrive at a rough but pretty useful indicator of the competitiveness of that niche. Useful to helping us narrow the playing field of keywords down. Not definitive in any way by itself. Only as one measure of competitiveness but nevertheless a useful measure.

I'd just pick something and go for it... your going to learn, success or fail. See where your site lands and take it from there. You'll figure stuff out and it'll all start to click once you get an idea of what is working and what's not.

I am indeed learning as I go Jason. Part of that learning for me involves learning to weigh one criteria I look at vs another not for the sites I already got domains for but for future keyword selection.

To be honest, I just look for keywords that get a fairly high amount of searches and pound away at it.

For you that might make for a decent method since you have been at this a lot longer than I have. I venture to say though that you actually use a lot more than just that in the form of intuition based on experience.

Since I don't have the same level of experience I must rely on more easily quantifiable criteria at least at this point in time.

I can't afford to just pound away at keywords based solely on whether they have a fairly high amount of searches. If I did such a thing I would fail at Adsense I think at least at this point in my Adsense adventure. And I would waste a whole lot of time going after keywords that might be too difficult for me to rank for.

Being #1 is nice and a high page rank is cool for bragging to other webmasters about but as long as I'm getting traffic and making money that is all that really matters at the end of the day.

I could care less about the bragging part. For sure Jason. I like the money making part

does anyone see my cool signature? just curious.

Yeah...I saw it. Took a while to see it though as it seemed you had no signature at all at first. Why you linked out to Google is a bit perplexing. I guess you were having fun or conducting some sort of signature experiment?

Carlos

[dburk]

Originally Posted by carlos123

Doesn't PR take into account the quality of anchor text surrounding those incoming links? As to whether the anchor text is relevant to the keyword phrase being considered?

Hi Carlos,

Nope, a page's toolbar PR is always the same regardless of which keyword search it shows up on. So if a page is barely relevant to a keyword it may show up at the top of a search simply because there are no other competing pages. Even though that page may have very high PR it would be easily topped by any newcomer page that was slightly more relevant.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Why do people who have been at this Adsense thing a lot longer than me seem to do quite well when taking into account the PR of the top ten sites, dividing by ten, and then going for keyword phrases that end up being an average of less than 3.

Although they take into account a lot more than that...for some this forms a very important basis of selection respecting who they will compete against. If this basis was not a valid basis at all then they would not be doing so well with it. I mean a basis of using PR as a competitive indicator.

Are they lying? I mean if they are doing well using such a basis (to a large degree) to easily and quickly determine competitiveness is there not something to the idea that PR can be a reasonably quick gauge of competitiveness?

I can't speak for other people, There is a lot of "Cargo Cult" methods practiced in this industry, so you should take that into consideration.

Originally Posted by carlos123

For example if searching for a keyword phrase in quotes in Google turns up a number of sites as 1,000,000 and searching on another phrase turns up only 1,000 I think it is reasonable accurate to say that the former key phrase will be much more competitive than the latter.

So it seems to me that this number, whether 1,000,000 or 1,000 has value (or importance) for helping us determine competitiveness.

Would you agree with that?

Not really, let me make an analogy:

Let's say you're an amateur marathon runner and you'd like to find a few races that you stand a chance of placing in the top 10. You have a list of 5,000 races that you could enter along with stats for all the top 10 placements from the last race.

You know that if you can find some races where your competition is equal oir lower than your own ability you have a great chance of beating the competition. But it will take too long to analyse the entire list, so you look for a quick way to narrow it down a bit to a much shorter list. Since you know the competition is too stiff for big races like the Boston Marathon you filter out all but the races with a small field of competition. Now you have a much shorter list to analyse.

This shorter list in no way indicates the strength of competition for those races, for example the Olympic Marathon qualifying race is likely to have a small field of competition but you know you'll have no chance in that race so no need to enter. Just as using quotes to get the number of competing pages does not indicate competitiveness of the top ten listings. You are simply paring down the long list to a more manageable list to do more in depth research.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Is not the comparative data comprised mostly of numbers? PR numbers, competition count numbers, numbers of incoming links, position in the SERP's, SOC numbers, LSV numbers, MSV numbers, ECPC numbers, and so forth?

I am trying to discern the relative importance of some of these numbers, in the case of this thread between competition number of sites and PR, to better allow me to focus on those numbers that might be more important to consider with respect to the competitiveness of a niche.

I realize that none of these numbers are foolproof indicators but I do believe that some are more important than others.

Would you not agree with that Don?

Yes, some numbers are more important than others, but an important number used for something that is irrelevant is a mistake.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Hmm...if it does not give any indication of competitiveness at all why use it as a number to help us narrow the scope of our research? Why not just...well...pick keyword phrases out of a hat and continue our research from there?

The fact is I will only be competing with the top ten pages in the SERP's. If the number of sites returned for a given keyword phrase is meaningless as a quick and relatively easy measure of the competitiveness of the sites that may appear in the top ten for a given keyword phrase then it would seem that we should just completely discount that number.

Again why bother with that number at all if as you say, it has no value with respect to whether the top ten sites will be more or less competitive?

Again, it is only useful as a method of narrowing the field, if you have all the extra time in the world then don't use it. If you do use it to shorten the list, you can't rely on it as definitive, only as a way to reduce the number of keywords to analyse.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Agreed Don at least in principle. What I am saying is that number of pages that show up in Google and the PR....seem to most definitely be....indicators of competitiveness to some degree. Of how tough it will be to beat the top ten pages that show up in the SERP's.

Nope, just the size of the field of of competition. A larger field of competition is statistically more likely to contain a larger number of competent competitors, but it doesn't actually measure the SOC. So it's only useful as method to shorten your research list.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Certainly looking at each of the top ten pages in question is much better at determining actual competitiveness but part of that competitiveness is reflected in the PR value in that sites which are not very competitive are likely to have little or no PR (links from sites with authority, quality incoming links)...I mean after they have at least been around for a while.

Because of that I am still leaning in the direction of looking at PR as an indicator of competitiveness. Not a foolproof indicator. Just an indicator to help me narrow the field of keywords down in a better way that using the competitive number that shows up in Google.

Nope, that's an invalid conclusion. Perhaps wishful thinking, it would be nice if we had an easy way to measure relative competitiveness.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Is not the total link value reflected in the PR? If that is the case...is not PR reflective of competitiveness to some degree? A degree that might prove useful for quickly determining the competitiveness of a keyword phrase? Not in a foolproof way but sufficient to help us weed out keyword phrases that are highly competitive from those that are not?

Sure, PR is a measure of total link value, but it is not a reliable indicator of link value for a particular keyword. You must look at the backlinks individually, you may find that absolutely none of them have relevant anchor text and the page would be super easy to outrank.

Originally Posted by carlos123

Doesn't the PR formula...at least the one let out by Google years ago...take into account the quality of inbound links to a page to some degree? Giving greater weight to authority sites with higher PR than othewise?

If that is so...could we not use PR as a rough but somewhat useful criteria to help us determine link strength competitiveness between different sites?

Nope, PR is strictly quantitative, not qualitative. A page with a million high value backlinks, all with anchor text completely irrelevant to my keyword, will never outrank my optimized page with just a few relevant backlinks.

The first rule of SEO is search engines rank pages not websites. The second rule is they rank pages based on relevance and all other factors are secondary. The most relevant page, as calculated by the algorithm, will rank the highest, regardless of PR or number of inbound links.

[carlos123]

You make a lot of sense Don and bring up some good points. Too many for me to do them justice in a shoot from the hip response. I will have to study this thread some and think about what you all have said.

And study it I will.

Very valuable thread. At least for me.

Carlos

[jasonmorgan]

Listen to Don. It's good stuff.

Yeah...I saw it. Took a while to see it though as it seemed you had no signature at all at first. Why you linked out to Google is a bit perplexing. I guess you were having fun or conducting some sort of signature experiment?

Yeah, playing around and testing out an idea with signatures and how to be creepy.