Let’s Discuss PageRank
July 26, 2008 By: Justin | 11 commentsGoogle is in the middle of an SEO pagerank update, so let’s discuss PageRank a little. I’ve discussed it briefly in my post about PageRank basics, but I want to give you a better idea about PageRank and how much it matters. PageRank matters the most when you’re getting backlinks, but is not the biggest factor when it comes to ranking and success.
Lets look at an example. I started off this site as a local niche site, but recently changed it to focus on bigger keywords. Well lets look at my site’s original keyword. My site sits as the 2nd site, but sometimes fluctuate into #1. My site is 3 months old or so and the site that competes with my site is around 5 yeas old and a PAGE RANK 6! But my PR 0 (soon to be PR 2) blog can sometimes knock them from their top site. Here is proof.
Now this is huge guys. When you’re looking for a niche, do not be intimidated by the top guy’s PR. It is NOT the factor that will rank your site. I will soon out rank Sitening for Nashville SEO, even though I’m moving away from that term and working the general term SEO.
So let’s look at the site that ranks above me:
PR 6
30,000 links
About 5 years old
DMOZ listing
So how do I / will I out rank them?
Here is a list of keywords used in their anchor text, ranked by the number of times they appear
- Sitening 33.2%
- Henshaw 4.8%
- Jon 4.2%
- web 3.2%
- seo 3.2%
- Nashville 2.6%
- blog 2.6%
- search 2.1%
- marketing 2.1%
Now lets look at my keywords ranked by usage
- seo 53.3%
- nashville 29.3%
- zombie 18.7%
- justin 18.7%
- briggs 14.0%
- search 8.0%
- optimization 7.3%
- marketing 7.3%
- internet 7.3%
- engine 7.3%
- seozombie 7.3%
The prominence of the keywords Nashville and SEO are MUCH higher in my anchor text. This is why I still rank #2 for Nashville SEO over sites that have it on their site and in their title when I hardly mention “Nashville SEO” on my homepage. The only reason they rank above me is due to age. Google puts a heavy emphasis on domain age and link age. As my domain matures my rank will goes up. In addition, link weight increases over time. They do not push their full weight up front. And lastly, as the sites that link to me age, the juice they pass me will increase.
Guys, SEO is two things.
It is solid on site design.
But more important than that.
Related authority keyword anchored backlinks.
So even though PageRank is a decent measure of your link building progress, it is not a measure of your success. I have now moved on to “SEO”. As I build SEO links, my authority for Nashville SEO will continue to increase, since I already have Nashville SEO links and the SEO links support the Nashville SEO links.
So don’t get hung up on PageRank. Link anchor text has a larger impact on rankings than PR!
Tagged With Nashville SEO, Pagerank, pagerank update, SEO
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Justin,
Lots have been said that BANS site will be de-indexed by Google because it uses scrapped contents from ebay and this has got me quite worried. What’s your opinion on this and if indeed BANS is screwed, what can we do to overcome it?
Thanks.
I didn’t invest too heavily in .info BANS and glad I didn’t. I’ve written a few posts about .info domains and BANS sites already.
.info blogs seem to do fine. It seems to be BANS that have the hardest time. I haven’t done enough testing to know for sure what works, but a few suggestions would be to attach a blog to the domain and point links to the BANS part of the site. Try to build links to blog and push it to the BANS pages. See if that works.
The other thing would be to put up a blog first and get it indexed. Get it ranking for your keywords. Then either switch to BANS or add a BANS.
I don’t think BANS are dead. My BANS I do have are .com and they make money. They get more traffic from Yahoo than Google though, but that’s enough for them to make the average $1/day. One made $90 this month, with traffic just from Yahoo.
A big negative of BANS is they have very little content. Try increasing the amount of textual content and see how much that helps.
Yes Justin, all my BANS are either .com or .net and most of them are making some money. What got me worried was the recent discussions in forums due to the impending Rage Rank update and many are saying BANS site will be penalized, irrespective whether it is a .com or .info
Hope this is all just hearsay though. Will see what happens in the next few days.
My first BANS got a PR update to PR 2, so they don’t seem to be slapping all BANS sites
I find content in a BANS site helps a lot. I currently run very few BANS sites, but my best currently averages around $25 a day, with a good day being $50+ and a bad day being around $8.
I was quite happy when the pr update came through. Now to build on this.
Hi Justin!
Your Nashville SEO site is showing PR2 on my browser today, so I figure you deserve a load of Kudos for that. My new Monetize your Site blog jumped from PR0 to PR2 at the same time, so we must be getting something right! Right?
Relevant links are important, but I do get a real buzz from the page-rank when it rises.
Justin,
You forgot to mention they had over 10,000 links, and you had a little over 2,000 incoming links. Good luck on capturing the national “SEO”. Id love to see an article on how you’ll do that.
Looks like you captured your image before all the stats showed.
Lamach50
Yeah, the image was capture a while back when the site was just “Nashville SEO”. I changed to title and removed Nashville, but have grown in links by about 1,000.
Yeah, it will be HARD. I have a few ideas in place. I’ve been working on a few of them, which has kept me busy. I’m in no rush though. I know this will be a 1 year plus goal.
lol, right now I’m moving around b/t 250 and 300 for SEO =P
Page Rank may not be everything, but it does matter. I have a PR5 site and I can rank on the first page for just about any relevant long tail term by simply writing about it. I can rank #1 for relevant long tails with INTERNAL linking ONLY. Zero external links are required to rank on the first page for long tails that are related to my topic.
I don’t know about you, but I would say that being trusted as a near authority site is a big factor there.
In fact, I targeted a term last week. One post. Not an exact match. I rank #4 right now. A few internal links, a post with an exact match and I will rank #1 #2 double index for the term. Almost a guarantee.
Again, ZERO external linkbuilding.
It’s more about being an authority site than it is about toolbar PR. Get several PR 5 links for your name or business name, you’ll get a PR 5 easy, but you won’t rank for anything. I use to maintain a few high PR sites for Vanderbilt University and use to anchor my name to an old site I had. In one update period I had a PR 4 and only had like 40 links. That didn’t make my crappy personal site an authority though, I just had a few solid .edu PR 5 links.
Toolbar PR means very little these days imo. It isn’t a “true” indicator of a site’s authority, especially since Google now uses it as a form of “punishment”. One Man’s Goal got slapped to a PR 0. It has like 9,000 links or something and is well over a year old. A perfect example of how “toolbar PR” is not a great metric to measure a site by. OMG may still have PR 3 / 4 authority, but they slapped his public PR as punishment for paid links.
I know plenty of PR 5 and 6 sites that couldn’t rank for anything instantly. You see this a lot with web designer sites, who cite themselves in the footer of pages they design. They get an easy PR out of it.
Your site’s authority has more to do with your 30,000+ links, 1,400+ indexed pages of content and 2 to 3 year old domain than it has to do with your PR.