Here's the deal
I own a forum with tons of links out there, tons of links on my page, a website sitemap submission nightly to google, 1000+ members, about 1500 links on google to my site, etc. My PR is 3.

A competitor of sorts has 60 members and only about 300 links according to google and their page rank is a 4. How could that be?

Because Higher Authority Websites could link to him, maybe he has better linkbacks than your site, its not the quantity of links, its the quality, and related content.

Ahh OK that makes sense. Thanks!

If the sites linking to your competitor have higher PR than the ones pointing to you then their PR will be higher. PR though isn't why one site ranks higher than another in a search. It's part of the algorithm, but only one part so you can still rank higher than they do regardless of the PRs of both sites.

Originally Posted by kofoid

Here's the deal
I own a forum with tons of links out there, tons of links on my page, a website sitemap submission nightly to google, 1000+ members, about 1500 links on google to my site, etc. My PR is 3.

A competitor of sorts has 60 members and only about 300 links according to google and their page rank is a 4. How could that be?

You can get a site on the top for a very competitive phrase with only a few links. I am guessing most of these links you have are either from directories or from sites that really have nothing to do with your topic and content. These links do hardly anything or nothing for your sites ranking. You want sites linking to you that share the same type of content.

Visio did you mean you can get your site on top for a less competitive phrase? You need links for the competitve phrases. I agree with getting links from relevant sites, but you still need to get quite a few links for competitive keyword phrases.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Visio did you mean you can get your site on top for a less competitive phrase? You need links for the competitve phrases. I agree with getting links from relevant sites, but you still need to get quite a few links for competitive keyword phrases.

No I mean more competitive. I am a SEO and have gotten my clients sites on the top for countless phrases. And I have found that a few backlinks with even lower PRs if they have relative content to your site will gain you a better ranking than many sites that are from vastly different sites. It may sound strange but then have you ever tried it? I would give you the clients site but the owner did not want me to feature them in testimonials so don't think they would like me posting it here.

I didn't exactly mean few as in 2 or 3 for all sites. A mean a few realtively speaking. Like I mentioned before my clients site which has 5 backlinks and all the competition has nearly or over 1000. Even when I used my software to eliminate all inside links from the sites pages it was over 500.
Generally you need to get alot of links and most of the time it isn't that easy to get a top position. However it is possible if you find the right sites to have comparatively few backlinks and still get good rankings. I will soon be releasing a piece of software which will find just those types of sites.

That makes more sense to me. I agree that a few good links from relevant sites are more important than a lot of links from unrelated sites regardless of the PR. I wonder how competitve the keyword phrases were though. Is it ok to ask for the site in question and the phrase? I understand if you'd rather not post them.

I agree that even 5 well placed backlinks can have more impact than 1000 links from sites that are meaningless. 1000 links though doesn't strike me as being overly competitve. Maybe moderately competitive.

I think the more competitive a keyword phrase becomes the more links will be important in getting a good ranks (especially when it comes to Google). Those links should still be quality relevant links. The ultimate goal is always a large quantity of quality links (at least more or as many as the competition has).

When I asked the question in my post above I thought you were just referring to links of any kind, but now I understand you meant relevant links and like I said I do agree that a few relevant links can go much farther than a lot of unrelated links.

I read an interesting post last night at SEOmoz last night about how semantic content can increase relevance between pages and taking relevance beyond simply anchor text. Thought you might find it interesting as well.

By the way good to see you back I hadn't noticed you posting for a bit unless I was just looking in the wrong places. I have been known to be unobservant at times so maybe you have been here and I just missed it.

Different search engines interpret backlinks in different way.
For Google the quality of a backlink has a crucial meaning.
While MSN Search is more gentle about quality, but the number of baclinks from different hosts.
Anyway, both these factors are the most important for SEs.

one good link from a high PR site can make all the difference