Page Rank and Actual Listing

[globalspot28]

My friend's site has a google PR of 6, yet when you type in the keyword "Afghanistan", his page shows up first. The page that shows up second has a PR of 7. How is this possible?

[ukplayersguide]

I think from my meagre understanding (i'm sure someone will correct me if i'm wrong). The PR6 site may have more links with the anchor text afghanistan, which would lead to higher rankings than the PR7 site. Otherwise google would be number 1 for all searches!! Keyword density would be a factor too i believe. Basicly from what i can see PR is an important aid but isn't the "be all and end all"

Harvey

[I, Brian]

Far too many people think that PageRank = ranking on Google.

But it simply is not true -> anchor text (ie, the words in a link) are very powerful and very easily overwhelm any factor PR may have in actual rankings.

Of course, a lot of high PR pages are often linked to with erlevant anchor text that gets them ranked well for those terms - in which case, in SEO terms, it's often simply a case of hitting your target pages with as many links relating to the term you actually wish to be ranked for.

[seo guy]

Anchor text = Rankings = good call brian

But also globalspot you must realize that google ranks on a possible hundred different factors, considering link text, link volume, page title, where the words are placed, how they are grouped, how the site architecture is organized and tons more.

Its like sitting there in front of a measuring cup with a dropper, each element that google ranks on that you have, you will recieve "x" amount of drops based on googles perception of how well you satisfied that criteria, this is done on each element and then at the end you compare the cups "not the drops" to see who has the must in their cup.

Kinda lame analogy but its really early heh
Hope it helped

[SEO_AM]

Good post Brian and SEO Guy. Another element is authority sites. You will see some top 5's in the SERPS that have a PR of 0, 1, 2, or 3. How is this possible? Google's algo gives a lot of weight to sites it considers authority sites. The only thing one can do is to continually tweak pages and gather backlinks that, hopefully, have your keywords in a text anchor to your page(s). The higher the PR of those linking sites the better.

If we knew the full content and weighting factors of Google's algo is would be easy. But, not knowing is what has created the SEO industry. Good luck with your trial and error. 8-|

[disgust]

just something to note: when something shows as PR0, it's most likely because it just hasn't updated the PR yet, it's most likely higher than 0 to google.