Hello Everyone,

Im not much of an SEO expert and i was curious on peoples opinions, Getting a website to PR2-3 is quite simple and doesnt require much effort, Afew posts and articles in the right place and abit of social book marking and your half way there, My question is with a sales-based industry like web hosting or dedicated server sales is investing in a page rank important or would your money be better spent placing it in PPC type advertising eg AdWords and Yahoo ?

Main point being with web hosting and server sales the main keywords are so bogged down your never going to see the first 3-4 pages of Google without heavy investment, So how would you lay out of SEO and advertising campaigning for such a company?

SEO is the winner in the long run and it is cost-efficient. People have more tendencies to click on search results than on sponsored links found in search results.

Is it all about page rank?

Personally speaking It is not about page rank at all! It's about helping people and solving their problems. That makes these same people come back to you again and again. And then eventually these people will help you climb the SE ladder.

Let's say you have a PR 10 site. All is done via Black Hat methods. No valuable content, nothing of help to people and served to an audience that is being interrupted to see it without even requesting such resources. Not good at all. This is not a way to build reputation.

There just isn't an easy 10 steps way to make things happen the way you want it. The three words, steps or whatever you want to call it in order to succeed are - work work and again work.

Page Rank, what is that, you have to serve people not some ranking system created by the search engines. Focus on helping and solving problems. That is what counts!

That is my opinion!

You should target a bit more specific niche. I rank highly for less competitive keywords. I've also found that you still need to try and target some that are fairly competitive or you will never recieve the traffic you are looking for. "web hosting" is simply too competitive though and probably even a bit too broad to be considered a good key phrase to target.

I've done all of my SEO personally and have never purchased any services. It is possible! :)

Page Rank has nothing to do with your SEO though. :)

The problem is that there is so much hype and obsession about Page Rank and thousands, if not millions, are led to believe that building traffic and getting loyal site followers are under the baton of PR brouhaha.

My PageRank dropped from 5 to 4 a few months back. Then I started receiving twice as many visitors from search engines as I normally did.

As a company, we launched a lot of smaller 'mini-sites' not too long ago. They have a PageRank of 3, and all of them achieve page 1 and page 2 rankings for a lot of competitive phrases.

You can conclude your own lessons from those two stories. :)

That's all I'm going to say, as I've said my piece a lot of times. In short PageRank isn't as important as it once was. There are far more important factors to invest in, such as on page SEO.

Pagerank doesnt really matter that much, especially since it only updates every few months.

SEO through SERP ranking would work out best.

Traffic and conversion you get from them should be your main focus - high PR doesn't guarantee either.

Personally speaking It is not about page rank at all! It's about helping people and solving their problems. That makes these same people come back to you again and again. And then eventually these people will help you climb the SE ladder.

Let's say you have a PR 10 site. All is done via Black Hat methods. No valuable content, nothing of help to people and served to an audience that is being interrupted to see it without even requesting such resources. Not good at all. This is not a way to build reputation.

There just isn't an easy 10 steps way to make things happen the way you want it. The three words, steps or whatever you want to call it in order to succeed are - work work and again work.

Page Rank, what is that, you have to serve people not some ranking system created by the search engines. Focus on helping and solving problems. That is what counts!

That is my opinion!

I strongly agree with this opinion.

I strongly agree with this opinion.

Thank you for the support! ;)

When I first started working with websites I paid lots of attention to PageRank. Now I only use PageRank as a guide.

What really counts to me are conversions, the next important factor is number of pageviews/visits.

Hope this helps!

In hosting word of mouth power outstrips any meaningless green smear in your toolbar.

Page rank no longer matters too much.
It is best to not get too obsessed with it.

...

Main point being with web hosting and server sales the main keywords are so bogged down your never going to see the first 3-4 pages of Google without heavy investment, So how would you lay out of SEO and advertising campaigning for such a company?


How would I lay out a campaign for such a company?

First of all I would carefully research the actual keyphrases that real live customers who may buy your services are using and then look at the top five sites to see how much effort will be required to rank for each term.

Then make a judgment on a few high traffic terms to rank for:

There are 149 million pages targeting the term web hosting and the #1 site has an estimated 70,000 links indexed by Google - a tough nut to crack.

But there are other terms with decent traffic and which are manageable.

Next build a site to target your chosen keywords, get all your pages indexed and then start to gain relevant anchor text links to your site - SEO friendly directories are a good place to start IMO.

If you need immediate traffic consider a short term adwords campaign.

If it all seems a bit hazy and difficult hire a good SEO who is within your budget and let him get the rankings for you.

I'll take a #1 SERP over a PR7 any day.

My PageRank dropped from 5 to 4 a few months back. Then I started receiving twice as many visitors from search engines as I normally did.

As a company, we launched a lot of smaller 'mini-sites' not too long ago. They have a PageRank of 3, and all of them achieve page 1 and page 2 rankings for a lot of competitive phrases.

You can conclude your own lessons from those two stories. :)

That's all I'm going to say, as I've said my piece a lot of times. In short PageRank isn't as important as it once was. There are far more important factors to invest in, such as on page SEO.

Your examples cannot be accurate, since you can not know if they performed any on-page optimization, and second you cannot know the real up-to-date internal PR values. The day they are exported they are already 2-3 months old. So the toolbar is perpetually outdated.

Besides Google uses PageRank values to help set crawling priorities and to determine if a document should go in their regular or supplemental index.

PageRank is the primary Google Search Ranking Factor, because it is the only factor you 100% have to fulfill to have a chance for your pages to rank in Google's search results.

Google says:
The heart of our software is PageRank™.....Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.

Also reading the article of SEOMoz about "Ranking Factors", you will be able to figure out yourself the real concept of PageRank:

* Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure;
* Global Link Popularity of Site;
* Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site;
* Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community;
* Global Link Popularity of Linking Site;
* Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community;
* Topical Relationship of Linking Site;
* Internal Link Popularity of Linking Page within Host Site/Domain.

I am not saying here that PageRank is the only or most important ranking factor. On-page optimization is obviously an important factor. Like title tags, rich content, etc.

But the question remains: Will a site rank without any internal linking, or direct external links?

I am not a Matt Cutts follower, or of anybody else, but still I would like to add his post in GoogleGroup:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that.
For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if
Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have less PageRank can also mean that a site won't rank as well.
If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to that issue, in addition to the other good advice you've already gotten.
Matt

For me PageRank was, is and will be very important. But not the toolbar! ;)

Also something else interesting for the topic here.

Eric Enge: Right, first 100k or something.
Adam Lasnik: Exactly. I don't remember the exact number, but it was limited to a certain size. We found that the number of links also correlated with that. So, we realized that we would be doing Webmasters a favor by essentially reminding them or urging them to put their content on a number of different pages including your links, so that there is a greater chance we will be able to see, index, and appropriately digest them, and include those pages and the text on those pages in our cache.

Now, at this point, as you might guess, we have a heck of a lot more resources and the Googlebot is a lot more hardy, and it's not getting indigestion after even really, really, surprisingly large pages. However, there is a case for recommending smaller number of links based upon user interests. What we found is that sites that have a lot of links, two hundred, three hundred, of five hundred, tend to have links that have not been strongly editorially vetted.

We would rather see fewer links that the webmaster has actually looked over, and that they are maintaining to make sure they are still fresh. And, that's not to say that there aren't webmasters who actually are familiar with the three hundred to five hundred great resources that they or their team have checked out.
But then, you get to a point where how many users really want to scroll down on a page particularly as more and more users today are using alternate devices such as mobile phones, screen readers, and so on. For the user it largely makes sense to break these up by whatever criteria makes sense for the user. Also, from a PageRank perspective, having a ton of links means that each one of those links is going to pass less juice.

Notwithstanding Googles PR write ups about PageRank being the heart of their software IMO its not all that important these days. The original Google concept paper makes it clear that all other ranking factors are computed first and then modified by PageRank.

It is not uncommon to see lower PR pages outranking higher ones - the conclusion I draw from this is that PR is therefor not a strong factor, although associated factors such as relevant anchor text links are IMO strong factors.

Also reading the article of SEOMoz about "Ranking Factors", you will be able to figure out yourself the real concept of PageRank:

* Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure;
* Global Link Popularity of Site;
* Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site;
* Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community;
* Global Link Popularity of Linking Site;
* Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community;
* Topical Relationship of Linking Site;
* Internal Link Popularity of Linking Page within Host Site/Domain.

With respect to SEAmoz if you want to understand the real concept of PageRank and its use in the Google ranking scheme there is no better source than the two papers published by the founders of Google Sergy Brin and Lawrence Page:
Anatomy of a large scale hypertextual search engine (http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=1998-8&format=pdf&compression=)

and

The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/1999-66).

PageRank is after all a patented concept and one that Google leases the use of from its owners Stanford University and IMO has not changed much since those original papers were written.

I have troubles with those that worry about PR of a page. Since we all know toolbar PR is basically useless, why worry about the PR of the page at all? Why should webmaster owners focus on core search engine marketing values like content, website architecture and social media and back links.

Hi Jaan, nice to see you around these parts. Webnauts, been awhile, how ya doing mate :)

Since we all know toolbar PR is basically useless, why worry about the PR of the page at all?

That about sums it up as far as the pretty green bar is concerned.

Hello William. Yes I will be around here much more in the future.

Hi William.

Nice to see you here too. I will also hang around when I have time, and if not to many scammers are screwing up cool threads.

I have troubles with those that worry about PR of a page. Since we all know toolbar PR is basically useless, why worry about the PR of the page at all? Why should webmaster owners focus on core search engine marketing values like content, website architecture and social media and back links.
Brother I did not realize that the discussion was about the Toolbar. I respond about the value of PR and not about the out-of-date toolbar.

Notwithstanding Googles PR write ups about PageRank being the heart of their software IMO its not all that important these days. The original Google concept paper makes it clear that all other ranking factors are computed first and then modified by PageRank.[/quote]
Just a question: If all ranking factors are computed, what happens if not modified by PageRank?

It is not uncommon to see lower PR pages outranking higher ones - the conclusion I draw from this is that PR is therefor not a strong factor, although associated factors such as relevant anchor text links are IMO strong factors.
Just because lower PR pages outrank higher PR pages does not mean that is not a strong factor. I would rather say that it is not the only ranking factor.

With respect to SEAmoz if you want to understand the real concept of PageRank and its use in the Google ranking scheme there is no better source than the two papers published by the founders of Google Sergy Brin and Lawrence Page:
Anatomy of a large scale hypertextual search engine (http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=1998-8&format=pdf&compression=)
With respect to SEOMoz, I hope you are already aware how much information was posted there also, which was misleading or not accurate. I would be careful when referring resources.

The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/1999-66).

PageRank is after all a patented concept and one that Google leases the use of from its owners Stanford University and IMO has not changed much since those original papers were written.
Maybe, but only maybe, the algorithm itself was not updated. But that does not mean that its ranking factor value did not change. Or did I miss something?

Well lets see, the PageRank Algo is the patented property of Stanford University, and for the use of it Google pay a hefty sum yearly, you can be the judge of the liklyhood of it being altered,

When lower PR pages outrank higher PR pages it means that its not powerful enough to trump other relevancy factors, though I do concede that in rare cases where the relevancy factors are almost identical it might be enough to tip the balance one way or the other.


The original Google concept paper makes it clear that all other ranking factors are computed first and then modified by PageRank. Just a question: If all ranking factors are computed, what happens if not modified by PageRank?

I have no idea, but its kind of counter-intutive to Googles heart-of-the-algo statements.

The true meaning of PR I would say is your websites trust with Google, I am not a PR maniac, or put much of my emphasis on PR.

Second, if your website PR is 0 but you have a strong organic result, your website I would say is optimized for Google, because thats what counts, it's the strong organic result not the greenbar.

The true meaning of PR I would say is your websites trust with Google, I am not a PR maniac, or put much of my emphasis on PR.

Second, if your website PR is 0 but you have a strong organic result, your website I would say is optimized for Google, because thats what counts, it's the strong organic result not the greenbar.

If you have a strong organic result its only a matter of time before your PR jumps up anyway.. So.. PR does show you in a way, how your site is optimized for Google, But it does take some time to establish

If you have a strong organic result its only a matter of time before your PR jumps up anyway..

I would be interested in hearing how you come to that conclusion.

I don't think the discussion is over here.

Please read this article and lets go ahead: http://andybeard.eu/2008/02/pagerank-google-search-ranking-factor.html

The true meaning of PR I would say is your websites trust with Google, I am not a PR maniac, or put much of my emphasis on PR.

Second, if your website PR is 0 but you have a strong organic result, your website I would say is optimized for Google, because thats what counts, it's the strong organic result not the greenbar.

So you are saying pagerank is really a trustrank, making the real trustrank redundant?

I worry for the ones that do not know any better than to follow your advice.

Thus PageRank is the primary Google Search Ranking Factor, because it is the only factor you 100% have to fulfil to have a chance for your pages to rank in Google's search results.

While this is strictly true (Google once said that if it cannot find one link to your page it will not be indexed) it is IMO misleading in that it implies that PageRank trumps all other factors, which has not been shown to be true.

It is also true that since we cannot know the True PR of any page we have no way of knowing if there are pages without PR which are indexed, but it does seem counter intuitive.

I hope everyone understand Page Rank is a cumulative thing. You can just go and get PR. It is the product of many different factors on and off of your website. Thus I feel it is insane to worry about PR. PR in itself is not tangible. You can’t hold it or control it. That is why PR Sculpting doesn’t hold water. All you can do is make sure your doing what you can do on your website to rank well. Tried and true methods like optimized title attributes, good architecture/navigation, relevant unique content, etc.