Question about PR and link juice

I'm sorry if this is an obvious question, but I have searched and come up empty.

I'll ask this by using a hypothetical scenario...

PR updates come about once every 3 months, right? Suppose I register a new website right after a PR update. Over the course of 2 and a half months, I build some very powerful backlinks to this website for a lowish competition keyword. By the time the next PR update rolls around, my website has enough juice to be upgraded to a PR4. The juice is enough to easily rank my website #1 for my keyword.

What happens in the meantime? My website has a lot of strong backlinks, but is still a PR0 or PR N/A. Will my website fail to rank #1 until the next update?

Essentially what I'm asking is... is PR simply a metric that measures authority? Or is it also a major factor in SERPs? Is linkjuice taken into consideration before the PR reflects it? Can a PR0 behave like a PR5 without getting the stamp of approval, or have high authority without high PR?

No-one knows for sure how google ranks pages but from experience sites will move up the SERPS following back-linking efforts (providing the backlinks are crawled of course!). I've seen a massive increase in rankings after back-linking and no change in PR until a while later. Moved up to page 1 and then got PR 2 about 3 weeks later after the update I guess. No change in position during that time.

That's my experience but it may be different for others - hope that helps you.

astutenacute said:

Essentially what I'm asking is... is PR simply a metric that measures authority? Or is it also a major factor in SERPs? Is linkjuice taken into consideration before the PR reflects it? Can a PR0 behave like a PR5 without getting the stamp of approval, or have high authority without high PR?

Click to expand...

The PR you see is not your actual PR, it is a snaphot of your PR as it was when Google updated PageRank. Only Google knows your actual PR, as it is in flux.

In some search instances, PR makes all the difference. In others, it effectively makes no difference: this is why PR 0 pages are able to out-SERP PR 5 pages, depending on the search query. That there are instances in which PR does make a difference in SERPs is what makes a high PR worth pursuing for your own webpages.

Your site will rank withought pr

I have a PR 0 site ranking #1 for a 300K search term


SERPS are updated more often than pr

Yeah same as above. Don't focus on PR it won't get you any better ranks for your term. It's a side effect as your site gains more authority but you can easily get rank 1 with PR0.

I agree with everyone, the only reason why people are so focused about PR was because advertisers will look at that metric to determine whether they want to advertise on your site because mainly because they want that pagerank and authority to trickle down to their own site.

As far as ranking goes, PR has nothing to do with it IMO. Run some kw searches in G and you'll sometimes see a PR0 site ranking higher than a PR3 site. Make sure you know what you're doing with on-page seo, and focus on building quality links.

JMamba said:

I agree with everyone, the only reason why people are so focused about PR was because advertisers will look at that metric to determine whether they want to advertise on your site because mainly because they want that pagerank and authority to trickle down to their own site.

As far as ranking goes, PR has nothing to do with it IMO. Run some kw searches in G and you'll sometimes see a PR0 site ranking higher than a PR3 site. Make sure you know what you're doing with on-page seo, and focus on building quality links.

Click to expand...

Keep in mind too that many times a website will be in the first position of a search query because is the closest match Google has.

If someone comes along that targets the keyword better their new low PR page may rank better simply because it is a better match for the search query.

Trust Rank (As some may have come to know it) is more important than Page Rank, though there's no definite way to see how much "Trust" a page may have.

I advise that you don't worry about PR at all, and just focus on developing a good website with relevant information to searches while continuing to generate backlinks. Remember, It doesn't matter how much PR you have if your page isn't what the prospective reader isn't looking for.