Understanding Pagerank.

[Lasher]

I recently installed the Firefox SEO toolbar - fantastic extension if you don't already have it. One of the things it does, when you search for something on google it displays PageRank next to each of the results. With my limited understanding of PageRank, I would have expected the highest ranked pages to display near the top, but this is not even close to the case.

For example, I just searched for "Xmlrpc php" for some tools related to a project I am working on. The results, in terms of pagerank, are:

PR6, PR3, PR4, PR0, PR6, PR7, PR3, PR4

So you can see there that a PR0 site beat a PR6 and a PR7 in terms of SERP for this particular phrase, and a PR3 beat all of them except a single PR6. One thought I had is that perhaps google maintains a pagerank for each of your site's keywords, and the PR displayed is your overall pagerank (you first keyword, or an average of all of them?) so in this particular search that PR3 has a higher pagerank for that phrase, but lower pagerank overall? I could be way off here, but perhaps we are all focused too much on PR and need to be more focused on whatever drives this?

Appreciate (and will add rep for) any insights anyone has and links to articles that explain it better.

Thanks!

 

[shockie]

very true that SERP results are not primarily based on PR, which is why it is rarely mentioned when discussing SEO. ultimately, i believe that SEO is more important than a site's PR (especially when it comes to new websites), but it's nice to have a high PR as well, since it is an indicator of traffic through backlinks instead of SEs.

also note that in your experiment, the PR displayed for each site is the static TBPR (toolbar pr), so it is possible that the PR0 is actually to become a much higher PR after the next TBPR update. many people see their PR0 sites jump to PR4's or even higher.

 

[dieptran]

I agree with Shockie.

The PR is static and based on the quarterly review. The SERP are more dynamic and give your the current status.

Cheers
Diep

 

[Waiter]

So what does influence on SERP position? I think that PR does. It seems to me that PR is constantly changeble value. But we can the changes just 3-4 times per year.

 

[shockie]

So what does influence on SERP position? I think that PR does. It seems to me that PR is constantly changeble value. But we can the changes just 3-4 times per year.

SERP position is mainly influenced by SEO (meta tags, keywords, content, etc). PR doesn't always change; some people have had the same PR +/- 1 for many years, lol.