It's not always the sites with the highest PR that get to the top of the SERPs, and PR does not seem to have any relationship to the traffic your site receives so why does page rank matter?

Am I right in thinking PR is just a measure of incoming links?
Am I missing something,why all the fuss?

Check out...

http://www.google.com/technology/

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

That should explain it all

-James

PR is not related to traffic

Thanks for the responses. I do understand what it is, what I don't get is why as a webmaster I should place any value on PR. What does it mean (apart from you have lots of incoming links) and what benefits does having a PR rank of 7 have over a PR rank of 6?

Thanks

Dont place as much value as the people at google would want you to. Its kinda overrated if you ask me. I've seen many search queries returned with pages ranked lower at the top of the list. I suppose they'll argue its more 'relevant'...right? Go figure.

As a webmaster your concern should be to generate as much traffic to your site and make sure your content will keep them there. Get as many links to your site because you can increase traffic not because google is gonna give you a better PR, ultimately you'll submit and wait in line like all the rest....

@Samn01: for example lots of links to one website means a lot of other sites consider the info there better than many other pages dealing with the same thing (shows quality). also being linked to by many sites creates more traffic.

@Sarafina: they are not always places above other websites because the keywords you search for may be more visible and more related to in other pages. usually if i see a page with a high PR in the first 5 results i'm more likely going to that one too (depends a lot on the descriptions though so it's not a MUST)

I was looking for a manufacturer of applique film, which was found on the 2nd page of a Google search.....I don't understand the ranking, I would have thought they would have been on the first page...

Thanks guys. So in fact PR could be an indication of how well your site may do in the SERPs but thats about it.
I thought perhaps there was more to it than that but obviously not.

Thanks for the responses.
Sam

page ranking is do matter but i have seen many sites with pr >4 listed at first 10
i have sites with low pr who is listed 2nd or 3rd place of popular keywords.
this is cause i use much ancor text for inbound and outbound links

and my opinion is that google will change pr system soon, its getting rediculous and not fair , in the begining was fantastic but after a couple time webmasters find their way to get pr 5 or more very easy. If you have 2-3 websites with pr 5 and a dmoz sumbit ,you will get a pr5 very easy...

as a user and no as a webmaster when i m searching the web after 3 years of completly use of google , now i m using again other search engines to find what i m searching for, and i think lot of people think this way, google must start to get them serious.

PageRank is meant to be a multiplier of a sites Optimisation Score

If you have a low optimisation score, but sky high page rank, you won't rank well.

If you have a high optimisation score, but low page rank, you'll rank okay

If you have a high optimisation score, and high page rank, you'll do great, because the PR value will multiply your optimisation value, and make it even higher.

Whether it multiplies it by its value or by a derivitive of its "real" value, no-one really knows

Thanks for that Dave, thats new to me.
Good to know, so page rank is more relevant than I first thought.

Think of it this way:

PageRank, as described by Google, is a measure of the number of links pointing to your page and the "importance" of those links, but it is NOT specific to a certain keyword or phrase.

When you enter a search phrase, Google looks for pages that are relevant to that phrase - how it then ranks all those pages that are relevant includes the PR factor but PR is only one of the factors determining ranking. Google indicates somewhere that there are more than 100 factors considered but doesn't tell us what they all are, of course...

the Google ranking algorithm contains over 4,000,000 variables...changing just one or two severely impacts on rankings for millions of pages (see Florida Updates info.). PageRank is made up from some of these variables - to do with links to sites.

The important thing is that PageRank is rumoured to be a Multiplier...as opposed to an addition...making it fairly important

Originally Posted by DaveTodd

the Google ranking algorithm contains over 4,000,000 variables...

I don't think it's quite that many - in fact, not even close to that many. It is apparently a complex algorithm but I can't imagine why any site ranking algorithm would need 4 million variables.

Quote Google:

PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google's technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

/Quote

My apologies, I clearly underestimated the Google algorithm, in fact, the pagerank portion along has over 500 million variables. Shudder to think of what the rest of it contains.

Looks like you vastly underestimated it too minstrel...

Looks like you vastly underestimated it too minstrel...

Good heavens! I guess I did...

My apologies, DaveTodd - you were correct - or at least a lot closer to correct than I was.

If they keep going in that direction, the number of variables in the algorithm will soon equal the number of pages in the Google index

In my understanding Page rank is a huge part of the ranking process, but only if the achor text of the links contain the keyphrases that you want to rank on, For example if ExampleSoft was competing on "computer Hardware" and it had a hundred link all with the achor text of "ExampleSoft" then it could stll be beat by "RubbishSoft" if they had one link with the achor text of "Computer hardware" And a PR of 0.

Plus I think you are in disagreement of what you mean by variables, DaveTodd seems to be talking about the specify amount of variable that google needs to calulate to work out the ranking (which a a very lowest possible google would need to have a couple for ever page that is indexed) and I think minstrel is talking about the amount of different types of variables for the claulation of a page, which would be considerable less, however still quite a few.

PR is important but not the most important.

Go on rocos ...

Stop kidding yourselves. Nobody outside of Google Inc. knows for sure what exactly makes up the google algo. Anybody who claims to know is blowing smoke up your you know what.

Sufficed to say, it's pretty complex. Leave it at that. Know need to quote "experts" claims as to what makes up the google algo.

As far as pagerank is concerned, don't concern yourself with it unless you buy or sell advertising space (text links). Even then, you should still consider other factors like unique visitors, impressions, Alexa rank, etc...

Looking at the pagerank tool (the little green bar) is like looking at the stars: you actually looking at something that happened quite some time ago. The google PR bar is behind by about 1-2 months. That's why, in some cases, new sites have a PR 0 even after after their first update even though they've already acquired solid backlinks.

Hope this helps.