Yigber’s Online Adventures

With all the noise and buzz generated around the PageRank ranking system one would easily think that it’s the single most important factor in determining a page’s rank in a search response page. In fact, I thought that for a given search, Google returns a list of URLs that are relevant to that serach phrase, sorted by PageRank from high PR to low.

Dead wrong !

In reality, something very different occurs: URLs with high PR sometimes appear at the bottom below low PR pages and vice versa. I pasted at the bottom of this post results of 3 little experiments I ran on Google. Take a look.

As far as I can make sense out of this, two things can cause this:

1. The PR on the toolbar and the PR in Google’s Data Centers are not the same but only somewhat correlated. So allegedly, if we would look at the current real-time PR we would see sorted list. This makes little sense. I doubt the PR fluctuates that much and with so many pages on so many different searches. Further, High PR’s are probably easy to drop from, but low PRs don’t rise up that easily and quickly.
2. The PR measure is only part of he ranking method, and looking at the experiments below implies that the PR plays only a minor part in it, much less than what may be impressed by the amount of talk and commotion around it. That’s basically the point I’m trying to make in the post, but for a newbie such as myself in this area of expertise (SEO) it’s quite confusing.

To make sure I wasn’t missing something big, I went over to DP and asked about this. Turned out I wasn’t wrong, and although some people already figured this out over a year ago, the crowd still pays too much attention (and marketing money) for high PR sites !

Bottom Line: PR will make your head spin for no good reason.

Experiments:

Search phrase: domain name generator

Search phrase: jungle

Search phrase: pagerank weird