SEO Tips - PR versus SERPs (Tip Sheet 4)

What PR and SERPs Are

One of the worst mistakes a webmaster can make when developing SEO strategy is to confound Page Rank (PR) with Search Engine Results Placement (SERP). It is widely but erroneously believed that there is a close, or even exact cause-and-effect relation between getting PR and getting good SERPs. But they are two very different things, and it is vital to understand what each is and isn't.


Page Rank

Page Rank is a measurement that applies to some one particular web page, not to a web site. One too commonly sees references to "a PR-6 site": there is no such thing. What is generally meant is that the site's front page has a PR of 6. One can refer to the PR of a site in the general sense of the cumulative PR of all the individual pages in the site, and that is, in some ways, a useful concept, but it is rarely if ever expressed in a numerical way.

A "PR-6" site can contain pages with ranks down to zero (or even, though this is unusual, pages with a PR higher than the front page).

Page Rank is not a mystical aura assigned by Tibetan monks in some secret rite. It is an exact mathematical construction, and one whose methodology is rather widely known and well understood. Exact details, such as the value of the "damping factor", are not known as precisely as Google specifies them, but they are known closely enough that the details don't matter.

There is no point in my trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to detailing Page Rank; there is a most excellent paper available on line that explains PR in quite some detail; I know of no better setting forth of what PR is, and of how wisely to control and conserve it.

What that paper should make abundantly clear is that Page Rank measures how many other pages link to a given page, and how much PR those linking pages possess themselves. It measures nothing else whatever.


SERPs

The reason we play the SEO game is to bring as many visitors as possible to our site's pages. The higher we place in search-engine listings for our pages' various keyword phrases, the more likely it is that visitors looking for those keywords will eventually visit our sites. So--to belabor the obvious--what we want is maximized SERPs. I say that that is "obvious", but despite its blinding obviousness, too many webmasters instead concern themselves with getting high PR values for their front page.

They do so because they associate high PR with high SERPs. It is a notorious failure in logic to confound simultaneity with cause and effect; the ancient Egyptians, noting that the Nile regularly flooded when certain stars were in certain positions in the sky at a given hour of the night assumed (falsely) that the stars were causing the flooding. As with PR and high SERPs, what we really had was two effects of one other cause, rather than cause and effect.

What drives SERPs is much less well known than what makes up PR. Every webmaster has his or her pet theories, and only a rare few are actually diligent enough to try some occasional real-world testing of their theories. And even then, those results are hard to interpret exactly because of the relatively small sample size and the great number of ancillary factors.

It is, in a broad way, generally agreed that having many backlinks from sites themselves highly rated is a big help. In particular, the "anchor text" is widely believed to be especially determinative of the benefit from a given link (the "anchor text" comprises the highlighted words that one clicks on to activate a link). It is thus clear that the factors that determine Page Rank usually also play an important part in determining SERPs.

The crucial terms in that last statement are usually and part. It is perfectly possible--and not rare--for the #1 placement for a search term to be a page that has a PR of zero. That's right, PR 0. And an earned zero, in the sense that the page has very few or perhaps no external backlinks whatever.

How is that possible? It is possible when the search term in question is one that is not "highly competitive"--that is, that few other pages on the web are optimized for. Note that that is not the same as saying that there are few other pages on the web that use that term. If you make up a word and use it a lot on some page, no doubt you will eventually rank #1 in any search for that word without a single backlink. But a no-backlinks page can also rank #1 for a term found on hundreds or even thousands of other pages if few or none of those other pages feature the term much. I myself have had such pages; they were each about some author who, while tolerably enough known to the world to be mentioned fairly frequently on the web, was not so well known that anyone else had a long web page wholly about him.

The point, again, is that SERPs do not equal PR and PR does not equal SERPs, even though they often to some degree track.


The Bottom Line

PR does not help pay bills: high SERPs do. Never forget that.

SERPs are heavily influenced by many of the things that PR is based on, but they depend on a very great deal more, from exact anchor text (PR is determined solely by the fact of a link existing, not by what the link text is or what the linking and linked sites pages are about) to numerous on-page factors.

Your interest and SEO job is to maximize your SERPs. If your PR happens to go up as a byproduct, well and good, but it is a largely fruitless task to pursue PR per se. The sole definite benefit from raising the PR of the pages in a site is a corresponding rise in the willingness of other webmasters (most of who are overvaluing PR) to exchange links with you.

This page is not about linking as such, nor about getting links, but one powerfully important piece of advice is this: when seeking backlinks, try to get not just a link, but a link using anchor text containing the linked page's keywords.

There's an old saying in baseball: "Take care of the hits and the home runs will take care of themselves." So with SERPs and PR.

Focus on SERPs!

(If you do, the PR will take care of itself.)

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