"Websites don't rank, only pages do."

George,
Great point - I've noticed a few sites that are doing well in the current organic rankings structure that are all tightly focused on a single niche.

The best example I have see to date deals with pest control websites that cater to a specifc pest. I've also seen an authority site on pest control that covers all of the subniches for that broad topic ranking well.

There seems to be a definate focus on authority status right now for sites outside of article directories and sites built in the Hubpages model.

Respectfully,
Tim

I say rank the page, now how you go about doing this might be misleading to some.

You can rank your seo site for "weight loss", the key is to build other internal pages to support that "weight loss" page on your seo site.

Chances are you will not rank your site for the keyword "seo", all because you had a single page that was full of seo related text.

Again it can be done "weight loss" on an seo site, you just have to support the main keyword page like any other keyword.

yes of course, always rank the page/article/post. But the overall theme/authority of your site still plays a role, IMO.

But if sites and not individual pages ranked wouldn't we only be seeing home pages in the results?

I think the reason a site's theme seems like it matters is b/c a consistent theme is going to ensure each of your pages gets relevant internal links. I remember a paper (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www98-arc.pdf) that influenced Google's algo mentioning something called an "augmented set" - All the pages two links away from a page (inbound + outbound). I don't know how many links away from each page Google actually considers these days (could be many more) but the idea is that any page on your site is going to have a long chain of relevant links from other pages on your site provided that you have a consistent theme. It would probably look like a real cluster f*&% if visualized lol. My opinion is that (with a consistent theme ) more content = more relevant internal links = higher rankings.

btw this is just getting technical - we could disagree here and I have a feeling we'd end up practicing very similar SEO regardless :p

George, do you believe this as much now after the algo change? It seems to me that NOW pages are more important than the overall site.

It seems to be true.

Given that you put that in quotes, it seems like you might be commenting on the 'ranking' thread I wrote where I said "websites don't rank, only pages do".

If so, I should clarify that what I was intending to do was correct the common misconception that a website has ranking position, rather than a specific URL, not suggest that there isn't a relationship between the strength of a site and it's various rankings.

If I'm off base with the intention of your OP, my apologies.

Michael

"It's my strong belief that the subject-authority of a site plays a HUGE role in rankings."

What you want to believe and the FACTS are 2 entirely different things.

Google Ranks PAGES. Interconnected pages on your site are also votes in the system.

Why do people make this harder than it is... Google publishes this information so you can learn what they want.

Thanks for providing these tips.I also think having a simple designed site and putting unique content on a regular basis can boost up your ranking in matter of time.