thoughts about PR and ranking

[dannyhw]

Even with PA and DA, those are much better metrics than pagerank, but the thing you have to consider these days is that the algorithm considers a page or domain authoritative on a topic by topic basis. A high DA site that ranks for insurance terms might pass visible DA to your porn site, but G knows you're not an insurance site so it won't count for much. It's really best to just stay away from crunching numbers and just try to find the relevant links. There's no formula now.

 

[matthewseo]

I know a lot of people who own a PR5, the links to there website are less than 1000 overall. I'm not sure how valid is your chart and anyways PR is not much relevant now, don't waste your time with it

great! I've got a lot of PR0 sites that I'll trade for their PR5 sites! do you think they'll do it? can you make it happen?

 

[matthewseo]

I do see your point but maybe your not looking at a niche where someone with a pbn works in?

When i target a niche my site will rank but stick out as it will be a pr 1 or something and everything around it is pr 6 etc ie a natural looking serp result built up over time with aged sites.

I think you need to jump in and make a small one and test both options. My monies on the high pa and da sites doing better.

Best of luck

do you have a an example of a PR1 out ranking an equally optimized (onsite optimized) PR6 site? I don't think it can happen, but I'm here to learn.

mostly if you have a lot of pa and da then you have a high PR... but you can't just have a high PR and a site that says "hello" and nothing else... and a lot of things rank easy for non-competitive niches... any niche where the site owners themselves aren't SEO experts or advanced senior level computer programmers is not competitive, this includes niches like: car sales, doctors, lawyers, travel, real estate, make money, mlm, get rich quick competitive niches (for me) are the non-longtail keywords for major metropolitan cities: graphic design, computer programming, web hosting, system administration, web development, web design, seo (little cities for these tech keywords are easy to rank and I can do it all day long in my sleep) but the major cities like New York Web Design:


#1 PR4 the top ranking site (for my search) is PR4 and the

#2 PR6 2nd site has more MOZ and ahref trust and authority (by far) 4k links to 375k links but the PR6 site has a poor <TITLE> and on page SEO and a cheesy theme from themeforest that i use for one of my network sites the #2 rank also has a lot of links from sites high outbound links which are probably being ignored or marked as a negative...


#3 PR3 has the keyword in their domain name and PR3 and the lowest PA and DA of the top 3 ranked sites but has more quality links (lower external links on the sites that link to them.)

#4 PR4 with poor onsite optimization (keyword appears only 1 time on the home page)

[TABLE="class: width-100"]
[TR="class: stats-row1"]
[TD="class: border-right"]URL Rank 50
[/TD]
[TD="class: border-right"] Ahrefs Domain Rank 59
[/TD]
[TD="class: border-right"] Backlinks 135 K
[/TD]
[TD="class: border-right-dark"] Referring Domains 616
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


Authority [TABLE="class: metrics"]
[TR]
[TH] Domain Authority [/TH]
[TH] Page Authority [/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] 53 /100
[/TD]
[TD] 61 /100
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Page Link Metrics [TABLE="class: metrics"]
[TR]
[TH] Just-Discovered [/TH]
[TH] Established Links [/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] 0 60 Days
[/TD]
[TD] 447 Root Domains
31,277 Total Links
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


#5 PR5 is a sub-domain/directory site/inner-page landing page from a PR7 root domain with very poor onsite SEO, they could rank a lot higher if they just put the keyword more on their page, but with a PR7 for their main page they aren't worrying too much about it

#6 is a PR 0 and appears to be a new site which might explain the PR 0 but has a lot of llnks and a high amount of link velocity, with no ahrefs data before march of this year, their links have keywords in the link anchor text but they change the anchor text between NY and long island and some other texts in a 25% kind of rotation (so here's the anomoly where a PR0 is ranking) they also have a partial match in their keyword... from this search i can see that keywords in the domains are still very powerful. looks like they just bought this domain name AND their clients, being fortune 500 companies, give them a lot of trust and authority

[TABLE="class: width-100"]
[TR="class: stats-row1"]
[TD="class: border-right"]URL Rank 18 [/TD]
[TD="class: border-right"] Ahrefs Domain Rank 43 [/TD]
[TD="class: border-right"] Backlinks 828 [/TD]
[TD="class: border-right-dark"] Referring Domains 27
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Authority [TABLE="class: metrics"]
[TR]
[TH] Domain Authority[/TH]
[TH] Page Authority[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] 76 /100 [/TD]
[TD] 80 /100 [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Page Link Metrics [TABLE="class: metrics"]
[TR]
[TH] Just-Discovered[/TH]
[TH] Established Links[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] 1 60 Days [/TD]
[TD] 4,959 Root Domains
174k Total Links [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]




#7 PR3 has better DA and PA than #6 and better PR

[TABLE="class: width-100"]
[TR="class: stats-row1"]
[TD="class: border-right"]URL Rank 34 [/TD]
[TD="class: border-right"] Ahrefs Domain Rank 53 [/TD]
[TD="class: border-right"] Backlinks 7.1 K [/TD]
[TD="class: border-right-dark"] Referring Domains 118 [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Authority [TABLE="class: metrics"]
[TR]
[TH] Domain Authority[/TH]
[TH] Page Authority[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] 32 /100 [/TD]
[TD] 43 /100 [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Page Link Metrics [TABLE="class: metrics"]
[TR]
[TH] Just-Discovered[/TH]
[TH] Established Links[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] 0 60 Days [/TD]
[TD] 53 Root Domains
3,693 Total Links [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]



Based on the above, to me, I still see that PR is the #1 ranking factor, with #2 being on site optimization, #3 being keyword in the domain, with the anomoly of the new site that is ranking #6 at PR0 with high opensiteexplorer.org numbers (DA/PA)

yelp ranks a couple times on this search because of their huge main site PR7 and huge number of index pages and the special deal that yelp and google have, i think they are dating or something.



Anyone else see a different pattern?



again if you pick a long tail keyword then its not a competitive area and you dont have to know much about seo to rank for it

looking at a couple seo guru's, matthew woodward and alex becker (source wave) you see that alex becker has better PR for his main site but matthew woodward has better PR for his twitter account, both of these guys rely more on youtube than organic SEO for their sales because they sell SEO software and training to dummies... again it's like anthony robbins telling people how to get rich, how? you write a book on how to get rich! lol

 

[brothersmaid]

PR is irrelevant for rankings, as it does not take into account backlinks relevancy. It is just a metric to show how popular a page on the internet may be. If you run top ten results searches on any niche, you will find strange pr distributions.

 

[matthewseo]

Even with PA and DA, those are much better metrics than pagerank, but the thing you have to consider these days is that the algorithm considers a page or domain authoritative on a topic by topic basis. A high DA site that ranks for insurance terms might pass visible DA to your porn site, but G knows you're not an insurance site so it won't count for much. It's really best to just stay away from crunching numbers and just try to find the relevant links. There's no formula now.

I thought relevance was created by the links that link to your link and their site content and anchor text... there has to be a formula, Google is just a computer.

 

[matthewseo]

PR is irrelevant for rankings, as it does not take into account backlinks relevancy. It is just a metric to show how popular a page on the internet may be. If you run top ten results searches on any niche, you will find strange pr distributions.

read above at my analysis for New York Web Design PR was the #1 factor with PR+onsite+keyword in the URL being the power factor in ranking for that keyword. no, low PR sites ranked in the top 5 and the only anomoly in the top 3 was a domain name that had the entire keyword in it which ranked at #3 over a higher PR site below it...

(note your results for New York Web Design might be different than mine based on your search habits/cookies and geographic location)

 

[matthewseo]

It really doesn't matter anymore. The concept is still the foundation, but only in the sense that other metrics flow the same way PR does. The sites that dominate are strong in all the right metrics, and naturally PR follows, but that's correlation and not in any way causation. If you don't just look at SERPs and look at all the sites, you'll find 100 PR6's that don't even show up in the top 50 for every one you see in the top 10.

I know where you're coming from, I'm from the era before there was a thing called blackhat where you could guarantee a ranking by throwing the right copy on a high PR page. '05-'06 was really the end of that. At this point it's completely irrelevant

thanks for the intelligent response (seriously)

my analysis, time after time, show that relative high PR is the #1 "thing" that high ranking pages ALL HAVE, but you're right, PR alone is not enough, you still need good onsite optimization, all the metrics are made up numbers by third parties who aren't Google and don't really know the ranking formula.

and your response brings up an interesting point... it's a "chicken or the egg" situation because you can't have high PR without high authority and trust, which came first? well first comes the link, then comes the PR then all the metrics are just numbers describing something from a particular viewpoint, but are not related to Google at all.

it's like looking at formula one race cars and saying that "to be a fast car" you have to have big wing on the back of your car, thick tires, no roof on your car, the driver needs to wear a helmet, and wear a body suit with gloves, and you need to have a team of people to help you get in and out of your car, but we all know that you can do all of these things to your own car and it wont work because there are a lot of hidden things that no-one, even the other race teams, will every know about your car, and you can't even see the engine, the suspension, the frame (which are the top 3 main things that make the car fast)

what i'm seeing is that the whole organic SEO marketplace has become 10-20 times more competitive in the past 10 years since I had a PR6 and now in my little town there are 10-20 more people doing the same thing that I do and trying to rank for it, where 10 years ago I was literally the only one doing it, so SEO has become more competitive due to the economy and more competing companies and then you throw in the fact that google said you can't spam links, these are the main things that are making everyone invent and use all these metrics and say they are more important than PR (which is impossible since Google invented the PR as the #1 metric! then you throw in all the lies and intentional mis-information about how to rank a site, i.e. just write a lot of quality content = bullshot)

i still haven't met anyone willing to trade their PR5 for my PR0 sites, anyone?

 

[matthewseo]

PR is irrelevant for rankings, as it does not take into account backlinks relevancy. It is just a metric to show how popular a page on the internet may be. If you run top ten results searches on any niche, you will find strange pr distributions.

I just realized that your comment about backlink relevancy brings up an interesting point. PR can be a top down or a bottoms up number, but was originally top down with the first PR being assigned (I believe) and not calculated... they may have changed this, but this is an interesting topic to think about... for example:

you can get PR5 from one PR7 link or you can get PR5 from a lot of PR1 links... and obviously a lot of PR1 links have the potential to carry more "relevance" to your site, but I doubt that the relevance formula is very complex, i think it's mostly determined by what's on your site and 2nd by the links to your site.

i have not tested this but I still think I can take a powerful site with a high PR and put good content on it and outrank a site with lower PR... I do this all the time already with my inner pages outranking other sites that are purpose/relevant related sites where my site is a more broad topic relevance.

Thoughts on relevance?