

Ask HN: How Trustworthy is Google PageRank? - mcdowall

Hi guys,<p>Wondering if anyone can give me some feedback on their experiences with SEO and their site PageRank, we have been feverishly working on optimizing our commerce site : http://www.off2.com  for the past few months and went live in the UK earlier this week.<p>Weve been crawled by Google yesterday (i think!) and returned a Pagerank of 7.  We previously had managed to get a PR4 with our static holding page through inbound links, optimization etc.  Obviously we are very happy about a PR7  but I really want to know whether others have found that PR can sometimes be incorrect and adjusted by Google.  I've checked over our inbound links to find some .edu sites which of course carry a lot of weight with their PR8's.<p>Would love to hear the thoughts on any reversals or sudden changes others have seen.
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pierrefar
There are two PR calculations: the internal one and the publicly visible one
you see on the toolbar.

Google uses the internal PR value as one factor (out of reportedly hundreds)
in determining the rank of a page in the search results.

The publicly visible one is, for all intents and purposes, an entertainment
channel like, for example, Comedy Central. It is never an accurate reflection
of the current PR value Google uses internally.

So what to do? Use the Webmaster Tools and authenticate your site. The
Webmaster Tools give you a ton of data about how Google sees your site which
is a lot more valuable from a little green progress bar.

~~~
mcdowall
Thanks for the info, I was somewhat sceptical we had just jumped from PR4-7
overnight, I have seen a large number of new inbound links but seeing as we
only migrated the site over onto the new servers and propagated the URL last
week we still have loads more work to get done on it.

Our keyword market in travel is as anyone would expect extremely competitive
so hopefully SEO over time will prove to be a good investment of our time and
effort, we were just rather shocked this morning at the new crawled Pagerank!

~~~
pierrefar
Well SEO on its own is not that useful. SEO to drive conversion is very very
useful. To generalize, what's the final objective of doing SEO? Common answers
are "get more buyers", "get more subscribers", "get people do download X",
etc.

To give you an example: I have a PR5 page that ranks in the top 10 for a 50m
results query. The page has links from really (really) awesome sites (think
multinational companies). Traffic from this query? Minimal. Why? It's not a
commonly used keyword and certainly doesn't drive that many subscribers to the
site.

~~~
mcdowall
Exactly, were aware of the relevance of keywords and the optimization of our
deep level pages with more detailed keywords.

We have started a review this week of our internal link structure and the use
of more specific travel terms, ie 'holidays in tunisia' or 'package holidays
in tunisia' for our deeper destination pages. Hopefully the relevancy of these
search terms coupled with a well performing site should yield better results
than we could ever anticipate for 'travel' or 'holidays' etc!!

Cheers for the input

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puzzle-out
If any of your team went to university in the uk, get the company featured on
their news page - they all want to push their enterprise credentials - with a
link, thats a free way of getting good google juice.

~~~
mcdowall
We currently lease offices out of our local university (excellent subsidised
rates!) so I am already over this, I've sent out a press release relevant to
the local market and the university. We should get some links on their
innovation centre website hopefully - its a .ac.uk tld so carries some weight
with google and other engines.

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profgubler
Forget about your page rank. It won't get you anywhere. It helps you know
where you are at, but what matters most is search traffic. You want to make
sure that continues to climb. A high PR helps, but focusing on it won't help.
Focus on building links with good anchor text, that match the keywords you are
focusing on.

And if you do have a an actual PR 7 in Google that is great. It means you have
a lot of link authority. Use it by targeting certain key pages on your site
for the keywords that will drive traffic.

