Is PR still important?

[dgheorghe]

Is PR of a page or website still important in SERP?I saw many blogs or pages with a low PR in a best position in SERP than websites with high PR.I think that PR does no matter so much in google search results.What do you think?

[RayW]

I don't think it's very important at all for rankings. A site with good on-page seo and a pr of 0 can outrank a site with bad on-page seo and a pr of 4 without any problems. It is important when building backlinks - all else being equal, a link from a site with high pr will be much, much more valuable than a link from a site with low pr.

[summerfranken]

Obviously PR shows how much quality in the content you have written over the web page. So PR have their own influence in SERP.

[android45]

Yes I agree with this, Page rank is no more important for getting traffic or keyword ranking, it is just a metric for measuring the site value and if you want proof go to seomoz.org.blog white board Friday by Rand Fish.

[sammy123]

PR is of no use as far as the rankings are concerned, you can rank on top eve with PR 1 leaving behind the pages of PR 4 and 5

[julianbooth123]

PR is now not of that much importance

[Targeted Traffic]

Well now most of the webmasters do not care much about the PageRank and concentrate more on gaining more traffic. Obviously, the success of any website/blog can be measured by it’s traffic. At Google Webmaster Central blog, they recently discussed the matter of PageRank and whether webmasters should track it or not. At present it is very clear that PageRank is not only the single factor for ranking system rather it is now a part of the much larger ranking system.

[John Moore]

PR has always been and will always been a signal that google uses to rank pages, it's definitely not an restrictive signal as many low PR sites can show up high in the serps, you will however, generally speaking, see most pages in the top 10 for competitive keywords showing PR of 3-7 on their homepages, so it's still important in my opinion.

[mikeleonard]

Yes You are right now days PR are no important but PR of any sites is the signs of quality content and importance of that sites.

[DavidWincent]

PR is basically a credit that Google gives to a website as it attains authority in a particular niche. PR represents a mark of quality information that a website provides and this is influenced by the number of backlinks the website has.

There are many websites having low PR yet outranking high PR websites, and appear above them in the search results.
There could be two possibilities for this:

1. Keyword for which it is ranking: If the low PR website is competing for a less competitive keyword and is highly promoted for that particular keyword, then there are chances of it coming on top of other.

2. Age of website: There are many website that are neither optimized nor promoted, but still have a good PR of 4/5. These websites gain authority due to their age and so get a PR as with the age.
So, these could be one of the websites among those being outranked.

PR's are still considered very important. You can get to see the difference if you compete for a very competitive keyword.


Please share your opinions on this?

[eurekapsycrille]

PR does matter. But it is not the only factor that needs to be considered in getting high ranking. Yes, you've seen many websites having better rankings and yet having low PR. It's because they have done the right thing in optimizing their sites.

Don't focus too much on getting high PR because it might cause you bad effects.

[JamesGw]

PR is more of a benchmark than a ranking factor.

Having a high PR will usually mean you'll rank higher IF your content is properly optimized for a given keyword. If it's not, then you probably won't rank as high as other pages.

Anecdotal evidence that people put forward of low PR domains outranking high PR ones doesn't really mean anything. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's the norm or that PR means nothing.

Basically, you want to strive for a high PR, but don't think it'll automatically get you a bunch of traffic. Google's PR algorithm is pretty strange and can afford a high rank to a site that really shouldn't have it. That, on top of the myriad other ranking factors means that it's not the most important thing in the world.

[eubertmo]

PR is very important if you'd like to earn big on text-link ads.
Other than that, all above opinions hold true.

[The Expert]

I'm going to disagree with most people here. PR is VERY important. Not so much the PR of YOUR page, but the PR of the palaces you get your links from.

PR is the primary indicator of how much links juice a page has. If it has a LOT of link juice, then it will have high PR. If it has a LOT of link juice, then it has the potential to send a lot of link juice to your site if you can score a link on that High PR page. If the page has low PR, then it has very little links juice sloshing around in it and thus there is no WAY it can sent a lot of juice to your site if you can score a link.

Most will say that the value of a link goes up as the the PR goes up. Probably on an exponential basis. Whether the function that determines how much more "juiced up" a PR6 page is from a PR5 and a PR5 from a PR4 is linear, quadratic, or to a higher degree doesn't really matter. The fact is that a PR6 page is EXPONENTIALLY more powerful than a PR5.

Now granted, there is a lot more that goes into the overall value of a link than just PR. The #1 factor is if the links you get are Dofollow or not. Authority and the PR of the root domain certainly comes into play or all the profile links that got kicked off by Angela and her likes wouldn't work. After all, if you get a "High PR" link from a profile page, it's PR0. So some of the PR from the homepage must trickle down to your profile page and out to your site through your link or else nobody would see any effect.

That being said, I don't often see a lot of PR3 pages nudging out PR5 or PR6 pages in the Google Top 10 a competitive keyword. Usually, if you see this, the site has a "real" PR that is 5 or more and what is being shown to the public hasn't been updated vs. what google sees internal. Check back in a month or two.

As to on-page SEO, I think this is a moot point. We actually see the opposite all the time. How often do we see videos in the Top 10? All the time? Are they loaded with content? No. Are they usually loaded with backlinks and PR? Yes. So we see an example where a page that is not properly SEOd (no keyword in the url form the get-go), is on a root domain that is not optimized for anything other than "online video" and still outranks lots of others simply from the authority passed to it from the root domain and whatever backlinks are pointed at it from outside.

[RayW]

Isn't PR a measure of the quality & quantity of backlinks, and since that is obviously important, therefore PR is also very important.

[dburk]

ROFL, some the answers is this thread are hilarious.

Google doesn't rank pages based on PR. They rank based on relevancy.

The value of inbound links are weighted by the PR of the page the link is from, the higher the PR the more that link will influence the relevancy for keywords in the anchortext.

[BarryWheeler]

PR isn't important.

Relevancy, number of outbound links on the page your link is on, anchor text etc, is what will influence your ranking.

Chasing PR is like a dog chasing its tail. It will preoccupy you while your competition outranks you doing other things more important than chasing PR.

[MatthewGreen]

PR does not help you rank better in seach engines but having a backlink from a high pr website in my experience makes your website rank higher.

[barbrine]

PR is less as important as before except need to exchange links. One of my site has PR 3 but doesn't have any keyword ranking.

[gxfcrjdj]

It's not so important as before.

[HarrySy]

For me, just a substantial content on my page not the PR number would draw much visitors to my site.

[wolfmanjack]

Only google knows for sure.

[MikeFriedman]

PR is not a signal for good rankings. It is simply a measure of the quality of the incoming links.

In a roundabout way though, a high PR can have a strong influence on rankings. A higher PR on a homepage is going to give stronger weight to the internal links on that site, which can impact the rankings of a given page. It depends on how the site is constructed though.

A PR 0 page can easily outrank a PR 4 or 5 page though. People get afraid when they see high PR pages in the SERPs, but a lot of times when you dig deeper into the backlinks of those sites you will find that they are not chasing your targeted keywords. They are just ranking there because nobody has given Google anything better to rank there.