Question on PR

Hi Simon,

That's a good question and I'm sure some folks will disagree on the answers. Some folks will over simplify the reasons and others will propose hypothesis supported by wild speculation and silly notions.

My answer centers around the importance of relevance, but let's first look at the PR issue. When you post a new profile page that is viewable to the public it will have little or no PR at first, however assuming that another page on the site that does have PR links directly to this new page it will be passed some PR.

This PR value is totally dependent on the PR of the page that directly links to it. The PR is further diluted by the number of OBLs on the linking page. So, to receive even a small PR benefit you need direct linking pages with significant PR. Of course pages on a website that has a lot of traffic is more likely to have more PR and that is why high PR is used as a selection criteria by many link builders.

Having said all that about PR, I should mention that the search engines do not rank its listings based on PR, so you can get all the PR you want and it has very little direct effect on your ranking in the SERP. This is easily observed by studying the listings n the SERP.

Now to answer your question as to why those profile links may be helping your SERP. The answer is relevance. You can get all the PR you want, but without relevance your benefit is nil. You must add the keywords you are targeting to your profile and particularly to the anchor text to get much benefit.

So why is this relevance so important?, The simply answer is that search engines rank pages first and foremost on relevance and only considers other factors when your page is equal in relevance to a competing page.

There are many factors that go into measuring relevance and on-page factors are the most prominent. In addition to on-page factors, anchor text from inbound links has small to moderate impact on relevancy scores. There does seem to be a correlation between the PR of the inbound link and the amount that the anchor text contributes to the page relevancy.

What I have concluded from all my own research is that you should focus on how your backlinks influence your page relevancy if you want to get an increase in SERP rankings.