PageRank

[BritishARMY]

Hello, me again. I bet you're getting fed up now!

I have a question on pagerank. I have just walked into the world of SEO, I didn't know a lot beforehand but now I know more. I got a basic explanation of how PR works, whether it's accurate or not I don't know. Anyway, I have a question or issue. Say like I get a link back from a PR 8 site (and this is the only link to my site) my site should then be around 6 or 7 (0.85 of the linking site's PR). Lets say we get 7 (rounding up). Now we get another link from a PR 4 site... we would get 3 (rounding down) from this, so in total that's 10 - but there are two sites linking, so it's halved and we go down to PR 5.

Can you see what happened? We went from PR 7 to PR 5! But we got a link from another site! Can somebody explain if it's better to just be linked with really high sites and not bother with smaller ones, or does it not matter? Have I got the PR concept wrong?

Thanks!

[hooperman]

Bear with me because my mouse is kaputt and I'm doing everything from the keyboard.

PR is at page level, not site level, so there is no such thing as a PR8 site. The hompage might be PR8 but it's the page your link appears on that matters. You might have known that already, but I couldn't tell that from your post. Also, the PR that that linking page can pass on is distributed between all the links on the page. That means that a link from a PR8 page that has only 2 other links on it is worth more than the same link if the linking page has 100s link on it. Your page doesn't get 0.85 of the linking page's PR. 0.85 was used as a possible damping factor in the original PR document that Page and Brinn put together (I suspect that's where that number is from?).

Saying all this, PR really isn't worth worrying too much about - at this stage - unless your selling links.

[BritishARMY]

Hi again hooperman,

Yes sorry about that, I meant page. Kinda falling asleep here! Yes I read, well listened to some guy talking about splitting it between other pages. That number was what the person in the video gave. I thought PR was rather important, but I guess it's not as important as I thought.

My situation is where I have some keywords and they are getting a few thousand searches per month. The competition seems low, as the top sites are not big sites (apart from a couple, which are crappy pages with no real value). Most of the pages are rank N/A to 4. I believe it'll be easy to overtake them with a month or so of quality backlinking and PR building (but again is it needed?) As far as I can gather, I need to optimise the site (h1 tags, meta title, meta description, keywords in content) and also do offsite SEO (build quality backlinks from sites with good PR(??), and sites that are related, be careful of who I link to and not appear spammy) - am I on the right tracks? I've never done proper SEO as I've never had projects last for over a few months, although I have one site which is abandoned with a write up about web design and it got PR1 some how... lol.

I'm off to bed, hoping for a reply! I may have droned on a bit...

[hooperman]

That's pretty much it BA: keyword analysis, on site SEO and getting good links. Good links doesn't always mean links that pass on the greatest amount of PR is one thing I'd add.

[BritishARMY]

Excellent, thanks hooperman, you're a credit to the forum! I'm looking forward to this, as I said I've never really had a site for a long time so I have never done any proper link building and I'm unsure of how much time it takes etc. Guess I will have to see! I really like this forum now and I'll be back with results!

[Clinton]

Say like I get a link back from a PR 8 site (and this is the only link to my site) my site should then be around 6 or 7 (0.85 of the linking site's PR)

I see you've done some homework reading up about PR. You do also know it's a logarithmic scale, don't you?

I agree 100% with hooperman's statement about PR not being worth anything unless you're selling links. This is evident in the SERPS. Do some searches and see if you can find a correlation between SERPS rank and PR of the ranking page (or their home page). You'll probably find none.

Also, some things have changed with PR over the last year or two. Many people aren't aware and go by old text on the subject
1. There's toolbar PR (tPR) and algo PR (aPR). They are not the same thing. Google is, intentionally IMO, showing wrong figures on the tPR
2. Sites selling links are having their PR removed. Some of it is done automatically on the Google systems detecting link selling, some is done manually
3. Google is removing PR from pages even for other breaches of Google's guidelines
4. PR is not flowing as it's supposed to be flowing. You create a new page on your site and link to it from your nav bar and it's quite normal for it to stay greybarred for several PR updates unless you get some external links to it.
5. Some pages are acquiring PR with no backlinks except from one low quality social bookmarking PR0 page. There are many other such anomalies.
6. The SEs introduced this "nofollow" thing. I don't believe it works to block/channel PR flows or ...anything.
7. Listen to Matt Cutts, read his blog, but don't believe everything you read. He isn't speaking in your interest, but in Google's interest. They are not always the same thing.

[hooperman]

2. Sites selling links are having their PR removed. Some of it is done automatically on the Google systems detecting link selling, some is done manually

Do you have any thoughts on whether this is just done for show and that it's only the toolbar PR that gets removed? I suspect that the real PR behind the scenes remains the same. There's one site I can think of that has masses of links, yet tPR=0. The site's pages rank highly for all sorts of things and SEMRush suggests that Google organic traffic is good. I suspect the site got caught selling links, had tPR reset but rankings weren't affected.

[Clinton]

Sites with whitebars all over that are doing well in SERPS make for good buys if you're after SE traffic ...as the whitebar seems to scare other buyers off

[BritishARMY]

Good information, thanks. So I guess I'm best to just get some good quality backlinks, by good quality I mean sites relating to mine that are dofollow.