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

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?

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.

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.

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