Every webmaster wants high google PR for sites they admin over, you actually rate a web pages importance by it's ranking in google. Google sets the standard for SEO and does all the crawling to index every site online.

Does this mean a website is worthless without a good google PR? ask me and i'll say NO. A sites value rest in it's content and layout. Marketing and advertising plays a major role since you're paid when noticed. The internet provides an avalanche of effective marketing techniques to bring your product or service to the desired prospect while generating useful leads as you do so.

A site with high CTR will rank well in search results even if it's google PR is 0, considering that google is'nt the only effective SE online.

Am i missing something here? so what's in the hype?

If you are asking a question... PageRank is considered important, but the amount of green in the PageRank toolbar is not

Well, G'day, geek4ever. Welcome to SR forum, Mate!

Got to tell you that you're all mixed up from start to finish.

Suggest you read articles and posts on SR, both current and archived. That should help you get things sorted out in your mind.

You'll also find your way to many more valuable recourses if you follow the signature links of some of the regular SR contributers.

Best wishes,
Laurie.

Thanks for your feedback. Please allow me to pose a simple question to laurie_m.

Why do you think that i have it all mixed up from start to finish laurie_m? am i not making any sense?  anyway, thanks for the advice. I'll start reading all the post and checking out every signature link on SR, both current and archived to get things sorted out in my mind.

I only intended to start a useful thread on the importance of google and it's benchmarks  to the webmaster today, but i guess laurie_m has it all figured out already.

Thanks for your reply waveshoppe!

Geek4Ever, Laurie does not claim to have it all figured out but he definitely knows where/how to look for what you are trying to promote. There is an array of similar topics to the one you are trying to start... it is not that we don't appreciate your enthusiasm but as this is a forum where people receive advice on questions asked we all tend to get to the point when it comes to answering simple questions or directing people in the correct direction - eg

Question:

Geek4Ever wrote:

Am i missing something here? so what's in the hype?

Answer

Laurie wrote:

Suggest you read articles and posts on SR, both current and archived. That should help you get things sorted out in your mind.

You'll also find your way to many more valuable recourses if you follow the signature links of some of the regular SR contributers.

Yes, you were missing something, the above advice will help you figure out what you were missing and realise that there isnt really any hype amongst people who have (for some part) figured out whats potting. It would however be far quicker if you do not go through all the posts (there are many) and rather target specifics. For example, if you are interested in learning about PR, do a search (top menu) for it.

Every webmaster wants high google PR for sites they admin over, you actually rate a web pages importance by it's ranking in google. Google sets the standard for SEO and does all the crawling to index every site online.
Yes, many webmasters do only aim at a high PR and wont look twice at a site with a low one, Google sets "a" standard - not the standard. Any good webmaster knows that yahoo and msn can play a big role in your online marketing and they all have their own standards... google just happens to be the biggest and therefor most focused on. The reality is though, real PR comes in very handy when requesting links, but is not the begin all and end all in the serps... as i recall, a pr0 site can overtake a pr 5 site depending on their relevance - at the same time a well built and relevant website should have no problem getting a decent PR as long as its content is original, links are relevant and nothing sets off googles flags.

Does this mean a website is worthless without a good google PR? ask me and i'll say NO. A sites value rest in it's content and layout. Marketing and advertising plays a major role since you're paid when noticed. The internet provides an avalanche of effective marketing techniques to bring your product or service to the desired prospect while generating useful leads as you do so. i am assuming you answered that one for yourself?

A site with high CTR will rank well in search results even if it's google PR is 0, considering that google is'nt the only effective SE online. A high CTR on a decent non-spammy/un-flagged site should generate some PR - at least as i see it (My opinion - not fact) but as an example, youtube has bugger all content other than random commentary but they have an incredible CTR... it cant just be from affiliation with google that is PR is tops.)

Hope this helps mate... and welcome to SR Hope to see more of you around these parts.

Thanks for your detailed response Ryan_steyn. I really appreciate your taking out time to explain all this.

See you around.

Not a problem, hope it set you on the path you were looking for.

geek4ever wrote:

Every webmaster wants high google PR for sites they admin over, you actually rate a web pages importance by it's ranking in google. Google sets the standard for SEO and does all the crawling to index every site online.

There are no SEO standards.... actually it's quite a hot spot in the community....  ;0)

geek4ever wrote:

Does this mean a website is worthless without a good google PR? ask me and i'll say NO. A sites value rest in it's content and layout. Marketing and advertising plays a major role since you're paid when noticed.

Ok, as Charles eluded to.... the Google ToolBar PageRank is not a metric professional SEOs take for more than a passing fancy....

A websites 'value' ultimately rests in it's book value... he he... or associated profits...

geek4ever wrote:

A site with high CTR will rank well in search results even if it's google PR is 0, considering that google is'nt the only effective SE online.

Am i missing something here? so what's in the hype?

A high CTR where? In the SERPs U mean?

Unfortunately Google is all but the defacto search engines... Yahoo traffic is minimal and MS all but invisible.... beyond that there is no one to discuss....

I am not sure what 'hype' you speak of as the world of SEO has moved on from being a mystical approach and benefits are only as much as the site that recieves traffic can provide (conversion rates).  If anything, the world of SMM (social media marketing) has replaced SEO as the new 'hype' method du jour.....

Thanks for dropping by and while starting a topic/discussion is the point of the place.... I think your approach seemed lacking and thus some peeps wondered what it was you meant by it all....

Welcome aboard!!

Hey Geek4Ever,

Bill Platt wrote an interesting piece on our homepage arguing that Google isn't everything

Have a peek: http://www.site-reference.com/articles/ … Is-It.html

Not really sure how to answer this post except that Google is the most common way someone finds a website. It doesn't matter how cool it is or how good the content is or how good the design is or how many bells and whistles it has or how much time you put into it IF NO ONE CAN FIND IT.

Think about that my friend.

Certainly Google is important... but in an over-all traffic generation program, not everything.

Depending on the site Google makes up between 30-65% of the referrer traffic for many of the sites I have access to analytics. In some cases where Social Media Marketing is involved it can even dip below 30%. I think it is important to note that different markets invariably have different numbers.

Now, if I take out the other referrers and merely look at search engines then Google is still the champ. Generally looking at some data here Google is 3-4x as much as Yahoo... and MSN/Live... well, less than 1/3 of the Yahoo traffic.

Where any of this becomes important is when you have an actual budget for SEO; this means each effort must be justified and have an associated cost and ROI. It's not that other engines aren't viable, it's more about if they are profitable.

Fortunately doing SEO for Yahoo... and to a certain extent MSN/Live aren't a huge leap for how one goes about targeting Google.... beyond that I would be wary of the potential benefits and often time is best spent targeting G/Yah ... but once more, it's dependent on the market. In some cases it makes sense to also target vertical search engines as part of a program.

I am also slowly becoming a fan of social media marketing as I learn more, experiment and hang with peeps in the business. Remember what we're doing here is basically social networking 1.0... it's more a matter of defining ones goals with SMM and even on a qualitative level, it has it's benefits.

Generating traffic should never be a singular of the mighty G; but they can't be discounted either....

TheGypsy wrote:

Certainly Google is important... but in an over-all traffic generation program, not everything.

Depending on the site Google makes up between 30-65% of the referrer traffic for many of the sites I have access to analytics. In some cases where Social Media Marketing is involved it can even dip below 30%. I think it is important to note that different markets invariably have different numbers.

Now, if I take out the other referrers and merely look at search engines then Google is still the champ. Generally looking at some data here Google is 3-4x as much as Yahoo... and MSN/Live... well, less than 1/3 of the Yahoo traffic.

Generating traffic should never be a singular of the mighty G; but they can't be discounted either....

Google is the single largest referrer for any of my own sites, but it generally only accounts for about 1/3rd of my own traffic.

PageRank is not as important as it is given credit. I have PR2, PR3 and PR4 pages generating lots of traffic. Occasionally, I even have Pr0 pages generating lots of traffic.

It is not unheard of to be able to find a lower PR page on top of high PR pages in Google's search results. PageRank is a minor factor in Google's ranking algorithms.

bill.platt wrote:

TheGypsy wrote:

Certainly Google is important... but in an over-all traffic generation program, not everything.

Depending on the site Google makes up between 30-65% of the referrer traffic for many of the sites I have access to analytics. In some cases where Social Media Marketing is involved it can even dip below 30%. I think it is important to note that different markets invariably have different numbers.

Now, if I take out the other referrers and merely look at search engines then Google is still the champ. Generally looking at some data here Google is 3-4x as much as Yahoo... and MSN/Live... well, less than 1/3 of the Yahoo traffic.

Generating traffic should never be a singular of the mighty G; but they can't be discounted either....

Google is the single largest referrer for any of my own sites, but it generally only accounts for about 1/3rd of my own traffic.

PageRank is not as important as it is given credit. I have PR2, PR3 and PR4 pages generating lots of traffic. Occasionally, I even have Pr0 pages generating lots of traffic.

It is not unheard of to be able to find a lower PR page on top of high PR pages in Google's search results. PageRank is a minor factor in Google's ranking algorithms.

Yeah, my blog has around 30% or so from Google... but blogs tend to get more social media traffic.. and other referrers (ie; mentions on TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal bring considerable traffic).... but that is juxtaposed by sites I manage that have almost exclusive search engine traffic.... it varies from market to market and site model (commercial, blog, UGC etc..)

As for ToolBar PR... ugh... a fairly useless metric....

This is not 100% true. If you want to be first for keyword with small competition (about 500 000 pages in Google), than high PR can help you to beat your opponents. But if you have serious competition (few million pages or more), then of course links are much more important than PR.

grishamist wrote:

This is not 100% true. If you want to be first for keyword with small competition (about 500 000 pages in Google), than high PR can help you to beat your opponents. But if you have serious competition (few million pages or more), then of course links are much more important than PR.

So how is it exactly that one would build PR without links?

bill.platt wrote:

grishamist wrote:

This is not 100% true. If you want to be first for keyword with small competition (about 500 000 pages in Google), than high PR can help you to beat your opponents. But if you have serious competition (few million pages or more), then of course links are much more important than PR.

So how is it exactly that one would build PR without links?

I have to agree with you there bill.... that statement was quite... um, redundant? not sure, i just confused myself trying to figure it out in my head.

A large factor in good PR is the links.

Links not only attract organic searchers and bots spidering through but they also help increase your PR.

Think of Page Rank literally, every backlink (relevant) to your page is a vote for your page, thus improving your pages rank. The better (higher ranked) the page voting for your page is, the more respect your page gets... therefor 1000 links from porn sites to your travel site would probably have less value than a PR1 guesthouse site linking to you.

Does that kinda clear it up?

grishamist wrote:

This is not 100% true. If you want to be first for keyword with small competition (about 500 000 pages in Google), than high PR can help you to beat your opponents. But if you have serious competition (few million pages or more), then of course links are much more important than PR.

Erm..... not to be an arse but if yer offering SEO services/audits, don't you think you should know what PageRank is and how it works? It is nothing more than a reflection of your links. And further to that it is a sketchy metric as the true 'internal PageRank' is more of a floating point number and not a 1-10 system.

Considering that there are many other ranking factors in a world beyond links - Bill is entirely correct that PR alone is not a sign of a high ranking page.

For example, I could write a post tomorrow, get backlinks from prominent authority sites and be ranking with a PR0 for that page, since the toolbar export hasn't occurred. So one can have a PR3 page (external PR) without even knowing it... yada yada yada....

Links and PR are synonymous....

Ryan_steyn wrote:

bill.platt wrote:

grishamist wrote:

This is not 100% true. If you want to be first for keyword with small competition (about 500 000 pages in Google), than high PR can help you to beat your opponents. But if you have serious competition (few million pages or more), then of course links are much more important than PR.

So how is it exactly that one would build PR without links?

I have to agree with you there bill.... that statement was quite... um, redundant? not sure, i just confused myself trying to figure it out in my head.

Think of Page Rank literally, every backlink (relevant) to your page is a vote for your page, thus improving your pages rank. The better (higher ranked) the page voting for your page is, the more respect your page gets... therefor 1000 links from porn sites to your travel site would probably have less value than a PR1 guesthouse site linking to you.

Does that kinda clear it up?

I agree with you 100%. I was even confused by his logic. His logic seemed to imply that I was somehow wrong, and I hoped he would clear up his statement, so that you and I could try to wrap our heads around his comments. ;-)

To reiterate my original point, PR is important in search rankings, but PR is only one of hundreds of calculations that Google looks at in order to deliver its SERPs.

Because PR is only one of hundreds of calculations, it is always possible for a web page to have a PR2 and still rank higher than a web page with a PR8 for a specific keyword search in Google's search results.

It has been my experience that while PR and Links (which are more or less synonymous) are important in the Google SERPs. I know that PR and Links are not more than 50% of the search results value, because I have seen instances (and I show an example below) where the number of links someone has to their website (and the multitude of other linking factors involved) will not  enable them to top their competitors in the search results.

Just to prove my point, a friend of mine has a SEO business as well. He was showing me the other day one of the sites he has managed to rank for a really-competitive keyword phrase. I knew that this site was #3 in Google for its specific search term and it was up against some of the biggest, deepest pocket websites on the internet. So, I just pulled the top ten results on that keyword search and looked at the PageRank of each of the results. Here is my proof of concept:

1 - 10 of about 52,400,000

Result #1 - pr6 - 7070 verifiable Google links - 3,723,382 Yahoo Links
Result #2 - pr6 - 113 verifiable Google links - 132,913 Yahoo Links
Result #3 - pr2 - 20 verifiable Google links - 472 Yahoo Links  *** my friends' client
Result #4 - pr6 - 6 verifiable Google links - 217 Yahoo Links
Result #5 - pr8 - 3140 verifiable Google links - 315,894 Yahoo Links
Result #6 - pr3 - 848 verifiable Google links - 377,581 Yahoo Links
Result #7 - pr5 - 318 verifiable Google links - 106,994 Yahoo Links
Result #8 - pr7 - 1040 verifiable Google links - 36,749 Yahoo Links
Result #9 - pr4 - 82 verifiable Google links - 11,778 Yahoo Links
Result #10 - pr3 - 4 verifiable Google links - 137 Yahoo Links

(As I am sure most of you are aware, the Google Toolbar PageRank was updated just a few weeks ago.)

The results clearly show that PageRank is not the final consideration on this search, as it is not the final consideration on any other search terms either. Result #3 is ahead of 7 other websites, which have a higher PageRank. This isn't just a quirk either. This website has been sitting at #3 for the last eight months at least, ahead of huge deep-pocket corporate websites. The only results in this list that are not big-budget corporations are #3 and #10.

Even #5 is a PR8 and it has been topped by four sites with less PR.

We have always known that Google's Link: tool produces far fewer results than Yahoo's Link: tool. This example validates that observation in every case. But interestingly, no matter whose link numbers you show with the search results, there are sites with more inbound links, below sites that have fewer invound links.

As stated previouly, PageRank and Links are nearly synonymous. With the exception of #4 and #5, both Yahoo and Google's inbound link counts nearly and closely match the PageRank given to each web page in this set of search results. In some cases, the sheer number of links rules the day, while others like #4 and #5, the value of the links indicate the PageRank earned by the page.

What works for wildly-competitive search phrases also works with non-competitive keyword phrases. This story remains the same whether there are 52,400,000 or 2,000 search results for the key phrase.

This is just one example of many that people could dig up that prove that PageRank and Links are not the most important element in a web page ranking well in Google.

bill.platt wrote:

(As I am sure most of you are aware, the Google Toolbar PageRank was updated just a few weeks ago).

That was news to me actually - While I use the Google Toolbar, I have turned off the PR meter

to me, the PR meter is a distraction, and I would rather judge the value of a webpage myself

@ Bill - well put.

The PR update is news to me as well, i thought it happened 3 days ago, my site got back to pr4 (i keep the tb up for interest sake). Its been pr3 since the complete overhaul of my site but since tuesday/wednesday it ticked over to the darker side. Havent done any link building etc to speak of, so i guess its all in site structure, content and code. Yay for people who dont rape the link markets, sad for people who do