Google Snipers -First Page Competition Sniff test

I would look at the page PR and backlinks, but in general an article directory page in the SERPs is a big green light if they are not highly promoted.

Patrick

From what I can gather, PR is a minor item in determining positioning in the search results. More times than not, when I run a search, I see an Amazon page listed at number one, and if I open up that page and check the PR of that page, it is PR0.

A more important determinant is the number and PR of the links that point to that page, as best as I can determine from what I have gathered.

Any time you see articles from the directories on the first page of the SERPS, that is a good sign that you can beat them out with a little work, according to what I have learned.

Yeah, don't overestimate the value of toolbar pagerank. Sometimes there just aren't any pages that are optimized (intentionally or "naturally") for a given keyword phrase, so Google just serves up the most relevant results that it can find. (Or think of it this way - if they just put up the highest PR pages regardless of relevance, then you would get PR 10 pages every time you searched.)

You can often beat out some PR3 and 4 pages with a "keyword.com" (or .net/.org) domain and just a few links with relevant anchor text. Granted, it's ideal if the first page of results is populated with very low PR pages, but I would still go for it if I saw a few PR 3 or 4 pages that had pretty low on-page relevancy. You won't win with every site, but over the long haul and with a number of sites, you should end up doing just fine.