Page Rank.

Darksat said: "Page rank is one of the things where people who are new to seo seem to get confused, exited and worked up about. I am going to attempt to dispell some myths about page rank and pass on some info. Q1:if i have a higher pr than my competitor will i rank higher than him for my search term. A1:Not necessarily. Page rank is calculated by the number of inbound links to your site and the PR of those pages. as google sees things links are votes for your site, but these links are just general votes not always votes for your search term. for this you need anchor text What is anchor text. below is an example of anchor text [url=http://www.aaitechnologies.co.uk/webdesign.php?/]London Website Design[/url] the clickable part of a link is anchor text, this anchor text is voting for the term London Website Design. your competitor may have 1200 inbound links and a pr6 but only a fraction of those links might have the correct anchor text if you have 200 inbound links with the correct anchor text(targeted to your keyword) and off high enough pr sites you will beat him with a lower PR site. Q2:So PR isnt that important. Yes it is. the more PR your site has the more weight you can give anchor text through internal links to other pages. its just not the the only factor. Q3:what about on page optimisation, which is more important, on page or backlinks. A3: in my opinion its about 50 / 50 Q4: whats a good PR A4:A good achievable PR is about PR5, if you see a site with more PR than that its very popular. Q5:how hard is it to go from a PR5 to a PR6 and can I get a PR10 A5: about 10 times harder from PR5-6, ten times harder from 6-7 etc, altavista & [url]www.ebay[/url] have a PR8, if you get a PR6 your better than most people. any other questions feel free to ask. Source. [url]http://www.aaitechnologies.co.uk/chat/viewtopic.php?t=48[/url]"

Darren said: "The single biggest problem is: [b]new people confuse ToolBar PR (which is fake) with Google's internal PageRank which is the core of their system.[/b] Successful web marketers don't need to waste their time chasing Toolbar PR. I have several hundred Top 3 keywords in Google, and 90% of the pages have ToolBar PR 0. Forget about it."

Darksat said: "Also most people dont concentrate enough on natural linking."

Darren said: "Describe the concept of "natural linking" and it's effect on the SERPS."

Darksat said: "Sounds like an essay title. ;) Natural linking is done by providing good content so people will link to you naturally, that way you will have a wider range of links from different IPs which will probably be from more relevant pages and your inbound links will grow at a constant rate which may help if google decides to implement Temporal Link Analasis, which, since they have patented the white paper on it, is a safe bet."

edwin said: "internal pages get higher page rank than the main page. what would explain this phenonema?"

Darksat said: "People linking directly to articles of interest."

edwin said: "i agree. but i did this experiment i linked two links from a page to another site. one to the internal page. one to the main page. according to the toolbar, the deeplink received a 1 point higher pagerank! i think this is important. more pagerank appears to spread to a deep link."

Darksat said: "You mentioned that before, thats why Im doing a lot of deeplinking to my forum, plus if i get more people in there my site will expand faster."

Darren said: "The logic behind why a deep-link would count more is logical. It means the remote webmaster thought enough of the page to link directly to it. Link exchanges and the like will generally go the main page. A deep-link is a sign of quality."

Darksat said: "I agree with that however I would like to know how you think google would treat a URL link as opposed to one with anchor text. EG source links at the bottom of quotes, etc"

Heather said: "Anchor text helps describe what a page is about. If you were reading an article, hyperlinks are used to direct a reader to the page of interest. It is free flowing and in a format that makes sense to a visitor. The extra links on a bottom of a page kind of look fake."

Darksat said: "I was actually wondering about the PR getting passed, im aware anchor text is better but im just wondering what just posting the URL will do to the PR transfered and possibly the serps."

Darren said: "Blog spammers will post the URL only, when they have the keywords in the URL. That way if the blog doesn't allow HTML, they can still get some "anchor text". It's usually worth it to name your page keyword1-keyword2.html. It gives at least a slight boost over pages that aren't named that way. But PageRank is changing. Radically."

Darren said: "Check this out too: [url="http://directory.sootle.com/"]Main Page 3[/url] It's linked from the main pages of [url="http://www.sootle.com/"]www.sootle.com[/url]. Now, let's check out a sub-category. [url="http://directory.sootle.com/arts/"]The Arts Category[/url] has a PageRank of 4. The only link from it has is from the main page, which is PR 3. The link command shows [url=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fdirectory.sootle.com%2Farts%2F]no links[/url] LOL. How did it get a 4 from a 3 which isn't even counted? One level lower in [url="http://directory.sootle.com/arts/music/"]the Music Category[/url] we have PR 3. Damn! That's pretty good, we spawned a PR4 and a PR3 from a PR3 main page. I think this is very telling. BTW, that's an seo'd directory I script I'm writing."

Darksat said: "dont these pages link back to it as well. [url]http://directory.sootle.com/arts/movies/[/url] [url]http://directory.sootle.com/arts/music/[/url]"

Darren said: "Sure. On the main page we have 10 links to internal pages. The PR3 on the main page spawns 20 PR 4s. These in turn link back to the main page, sharing some of the PR. But still. I think the main page PR is [b]artificially lowered[/b]."

Darksat said: "I agree, I have seen some evidence to support this."

edwin said: "make sense. it would effect link traders and link sellers."

Heather said: "But.. If the categories are ranking higher than the main page, what would it matter? Wouldn't the extra PR of the categories still pass to the links? Only the main page would be lowered in PR value? Maybe its "content" related? Or maybe the Toolbar is just broken?"

Darksat said: "Also because a lot of people concentrate the SEO efforts on the main page the catagories would end up being more natural, end result, more natural high quality results."

edwin said: "i think it's real possible they did it. in a natural world, the links would usually be to a specific article. a link to a main page seems somewhat fishy, accept from directories."

Darksat said: "[QUOTE=edwin]accept from directories.[/QUOTE] Is that american spelling or just a misspelling/bad grammar? we say except over here."

raven said: "LOL, over here too."

edwin said: "if i corrected all of darksat's errors it would be a full time job!"

Darksat said: "At least you would have something to do. ;)"