Search Result Rankings vs. PageRank (PR)
There is a lot of confusion between PageRank and search result rankings. Many people unnecessarily obsess over the importance of PageRank. The general assumption is that high PR equates high rankings. This is not necessarily true. There are PR8 sites that cannot be found in Google unless you specifically search for them by their company name. On the other hand, there are PR3 sites that can be found in the top search results for their specific keywords.
The truth is that PR is just one of the many factors that determines a page’s actual rank on search result page (SERP) for a given search query (See Matt Cutt’s comment).
It is very common to that a page with a lower PR is positioned higher on a SERP than a page with a higher PR. This shows that PR is not the most important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. A low-PR site that is properly optimized for a keyword phrase can outrank a high-PR site which is not keyword-optimized.
Toolbar PageRank vs. Actual PageRank
Google Toolbar allows you to see an approximate PR value for any indexed page. However, these PR values you see on the toolbar are not the actual PageRank values that Google takes into consideration while ranking web pages. The Google toolbar is segmented into 10 equal linear values from 0 to 10. The actual PR is, however, calculated on a logarithmic scale and is estimated to be between log base 5 and log base 10. But often it’s the toolbar PR value that most people talk about and unnecessarily agonize over.
September 27th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Samreen,
PR was once a major factor in Google’s algorithm, it has right now changed from PageRank to more like a “Trust Rank”.
You don’t get a good trust rank by getting a PageRank. It doesn’t passes through link values either, According to my assumption and believe, it’s more of a good review kind of a situation now where if you have been in business for more than a year with positive reviews, you have gained the trust rank.
Link building is still being used in their algorithm to know whether a site is more relevant or should be ranked for the “term” used in the anchor text by another website. That, I believe, will not be changed or else they would have to switch their engine towards “social bookmarketing kinda of a engine” if you know what I mean.
- Zafar Ahmed
September 27th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Zafar, yes, lots of SEO professionals believe that Google and other search engines like Yahoo rank Web sites based on how “trusted” they are in their particular niches. In fact, Yahoo! has also published a paper, that introduced the concept of TrustRank. However, a site’s TrustRank is not made available to the public; but we can assume that sites that are ranked highly by Google and Yahoo’s algorithm for competitive keywords likely possess a high trust score.
So the point is obtaining links from highly trusted sites has a greater effect on your search-engine rankings than obtaining links from sites with high PageRank alone. Of course, like you said, obtaining links from other websites is very important. But only evaluating a site based on its PageRank (like most people do) is not wise. Some of the factors that determine Trust Rank include the age of a website, amount of unique content on the site, number of quality incoming links, high ranks for many keywords related to their niche.
September 28th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
For us SEO’s it’s the quality of the incoming links that gives us the “trust”. For search engine, if you ask me, it’s “build trust with your visitors, and we trust you”.
With that being said, there comes many factor to build trust with your visitors. Any website you see which has been successfully in business without scamming anyone is the one with good ranking in Google always.
If you ask me Samreen, I would says “quality links” is one of the main factor out of other “main” factors which helps you build trust.
September 28th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
That’s exactly what I said
September 29th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Glad to know we are both on the same page. =)
November 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
AOA,
lately i got your website and found it interesting.. i have some ambiguities regarding to free directories back links.. suppose i find 10 free directories per day and submit my site in them but when i search these directories with the URL in search engines they don’t fetch any result.. so my question is that either the back links i am getting from them are beneficial for my site..and what kind of link is more important back links from the directories or links from the websites…