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Google PR (PageRank) is important in search rankings, but PR is only one of hundreds of calculations that Google looks at in order to deliver its SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Because PR is only one of hundreds of calculations, it is always possible for a web page to have a PR2 and still rank higher than a web page with a PR8 for a specific keyword search in Google’s search results.

It has been my experience that while PageRank and Links (which are more or less synonymous, since PageRank is a ranking value derived by Google representing the number and value of pages pointing to the target web page) are important in the Google SERPs, PageRank by itself cannot guarantee your website top rankings in Google. I know that PR and Links are not more than 50% of Google’s ranking considerations, because I have seen instances (and I show an example below) where the number of links someone has to their website (as one of the multitude of other linking factors involved) will not enable people to always top their competitors in the search results.

Just to prove my point, a friend of mine has a SEO business. He was showing me the other day one of the sites he has managed to rank for a really-competitive keyword phrase. I knew that this site was #3 in Google for its specific search term and it was up against some of the biggest, deepest pocket websites on the internet (think Cnet, Tucows, and the like). So, I just pulled the top ten results on that keyword search and looked at the PageRank of each of the results. Here is my proof of concept:

1 - 10 of about 52,400,000

Result #1 - pr6 - 7,070 visible Google links - 3,723,382 Yahoo Links

Result #2 - pr6 - 113 Google links - 132,913 Yahoo Links

Result #3 - pr2 - 20 Google links - 472 Yahoo Links  *** my friends’ client

Result #4 - pr6 - 6 Google links - 217 Yahoo Links

Result #5 - pr8 - 3,140 Google links - 315,894 Yahoo Links

Result #6 - pr3 - 848 Google links - 377,581 Yahoo Links

Result #7 - pr5 - 318 Google links - 106,994 Yahoo Links

Result #8 - pr7 - 1,040 Google links - 36,749 Yahoo Links

Result #9 - pr4 - 82 Google links - 11,778 Yahoo Links

Result #10 - pr3 - 4 Google links - 137 Yahoo Links

(As I am sure most of you are aware, the Google Toolbar PageRank was updated just a few weeks ago, so these PageRank numbers should be considered fairly accurate at this time.)

These results clearly show that PageRank is not the final consideration on this search and the number of inbound links will not be the final consideration either.

Result #3 is ahead of 7 other websites, which have a higher PageRank, and it has fewer inbound links than all but two of those web pages listed under it in Google’s search results. This isn’t just a quirk either. This website has been sitting at #3 for the last eight months at least, ahead of huge deep-pocket corporate websites. The only results that are not big-budget corporations, in this list of ten websites, are #3 and #10.

Even #5 is a PR8 and it has been topped by four sites with less Google PageRank and three sites with fewer inbound links.

We have always known that Google’s Link: tool produces far fewer results than Yahoo’s Link: tool. This example validates that observation in every case. (The only way to get closer-to-accurate numbers for the inbound links calculation from Google is to log into the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.) But interestingly, no matter whose link numbers you show with the search results, there are sites with more inbound links, below sites that have fewer inbound links.

As stated previously, Google PageRank and Inbound Links are nearly synonymous. With the exception of #4 and #5, both Yahoo and Google’s inbound link counts nearly and closely match the PageRank given to each web page in this set of search results. In some cases, the sheer number of links rules the day, while others like #4 and #5, the value of the links pointing to the website indicate the PageRank earned by the page.

What works for wildly-competitive search phrases also works with non-competitive keyword phrases. This story remains the same whether there are 52,400,000 or 2,000 search results for the key phrase.

This is just one example of many that people could dig up that prove that Google PageRank and Inbound Links are not the most important elements in a web page ranking well in Google.

Google Love is a description that people use to describe Link Popularity in Google’s search engine results. This post tells a bit more about that and how to influence it.

Articles have proven effective at building inbound links for a website, building PageRank and driving traffic to a website. But, many people seem to think that the inbound links created from article marketing will guarantee search engine placement inside of Google. While important, inbound links and high PageRank is not a one-size-fits-all solution to anything. I have in the past pushed certain keyword phrases to page one of Google using only article marketing, and in conjunction with other methods, but even though I write tons of articles and build hundreds of inbound links to my website every month, I still have certain desired keywords on page three, four and five of Google’s search results.

PageRank and Inbound Links are important in the Google ranking game, but they are not the only factors that will influence ranking success in Google. If you desire to keep the mindset that Google PageRank is the only factor that will influence the success of your website, then read this article.

To learn more about article marketing, visit my primary website: http://www.thephantomwriters.com

My name is Bill Platt, and I hope you found this article informative and helpful to you.

Webmasters everywhere strive to acquire Google Love.

Google Love is a concept meant to describe Google’s favoritism of one web page over another web page in its SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

To be honest, Google Love is not the result of Google, Inc. favoring one advertiser over another, but Google’s algorithms favoring one web page over another.

As a whole, The Phantom Writers website gets a lot of Google Love, for hundreds of important search keyword phrases. As the owner of The Phantom Writers, I am pleased about that.

Many people suggest that we have just “lucked into” our Google Love, but the truth is that our Google Love is the result of a lot of planning and hard work on our part. In previous blog posts, we laid the foundations for you to understand how we earned our considerable Google Love.

First, we outlined our most important Article Marketing Success Secret. Then we took this scenario one step further, describing in detail how our article marketing strategies ensure the long-term success of our Google Love strategy.

Once you have read the above-mentioned blog posts, you will understand most of the “how we did it.” But the thing that I did not mention in those posts is the fact that I frequently change my article resource boxes, and more to the point, I frequently change the keywords I target in my links’ anchor text. It is a fact that we target dozens of keyword phrases on a rotating basis.

And beyond this foundation, we try to target links to not only our main page, but also several of our internal pages, through deep-linking practices. To get a feel for how deep-linking helps in our SEO campaigns, put The Phantom Writers into Google and do a search, or just click here to see the results. When you see the listing for our site, Google not only shows links to our main page, but also to six deep-links within our website. The root advantage is that Google is viewing a full seven pages of our website as high-value pages. The best benefit of this outcome is that we actually have seven high-value chances to be seen by more people and to attract more customers.

Just today I took a phone call from a potential customer who pointed out that he had to give me a call, because no matter how many search terms he put into Google to find a service similar to mine, that my site kept coming up in the top of the search results.

Think about that for a moment…

Someone types in one of your target keywords and sees your website in the search results. But for whatever reason, they do not visit your website immediately. So they type in a new search phrase, and they see your website, but they still don’t click your link. After ten searches and seeing your name towards the top of the search results for all of those search terms, they have to click your link, because suddenly, your website is known to them and they are curious why you rank so well for so many search phrases.

Google’s Love for our website, for so many keyword phrases, has pretty much ensured that our website can obtain the magic 7 exposures, in the Marketing Rule of Seven, while our potential customers are trying out all of the keywords important to our marketing strategy. Simply put, we do not have to rely on having good rankings for the specific keyword someone is putting into Google search. It is nice that I don’t have to read people’s minds and make sure that I rank for the search term someone is going to put into Google. I rank for dozens of the potential keywords, making it much easier for me to obtain more traffic from Google.  That allows me to build forward without sweating the little things.

The main thing that must be spoken about in any discussion of Google Love is that your ability to get it is determined more by what your competition has done before you than any other factor. For example, if one of your competitors has thousands of links that Google counts as high-value links, pointing to their site, then your dozens of new links will not even scratch the surface of what you need to do to get your own Google Love for your keywords. If you are just starting out in the quest to acquire Google Love, it is frequently best to start with long-tail keywords and to put those high-traffic target keywords into your long-term goal column and work them from time-to-time, until you start cracking the top 50.

I have two keyword phrases that I would like to rank for that are hyper-competitive. I create some links with those keywords in the anchor text and peg away at them over time, with no great expectations for topping Google’s SERPs for those terms. I have been pegging away at those two terms for a number of years, and I am making progress, but I have a ways to go yet, as those terms currently place me at #24 and #44 in Google.

There are surely search terms that are going to be just as difficult for you to rank for, so it makes far more sense to seek out Google Love for some long-tail keywords that you can easily rank and generate traffic and sales from now. And then as you move forward, keep pegging away at those search terms that are golden in the search ranking game.

Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers
405-780-7745 M-F 9am-6pm CST

The underlying principle of our writing is that what we write should be attractive to readers, and therefore attractive to publishers and webmasters.

It is not enough to simply throw words together. We must be willing to tell stories that people want to read.

If we provide the right content to the people who want it, and our audience is excited about the story we tell, then people will link to our articles, wherever the article might be published.

When people link to the articles we publish, the sites that publish our articles gain PageRank for the pages where our articles are posted. This in turn ensures that more of our articles will pass more PageRank to our own websites.

When people want to link to our articles, that is the very definition of credibility in the eyes of readers and in the algorithms of the search engines.

Simply getting a link from another website, via our articles is not good enough. Unless our article is posted on a page that will receive lots of traffic, we will not benefit from the posting of our article somewhere. Those pages that house our articles, which have no traffic, will never gain PageRank, because no one is reading them or linking to them.

Therefore, unless our articles are posted on pages that humans visit and read, then the search engines will not favor us.

This is the foundational concept for all of our article marketing activities.

It does not matter to us if we do your article writing or someone else does your writing. So long as your writers put the needs of your readers above your desires for Search optimized articles, then the search optimization will take care of itself.

The dance that all of us find ourselves doing is trying to make articles optimized to specific keywords, and at the same time ensuring that readers will like the articles, so that people will publish and link to the articles.

We really can do both with articles, search engine optimize and reader-friendly. Reader-friendly ensures wide publication, so that is the more important of the two factors. But if we are clever and subtle about it, we can create articles that people will want to read, and we can do it in such a way as to ensure the search engines will favor our articles for specific keywords.

If you are truly interested in improving your writing and circulation of your articles, writing for the human first will be essential to your success.

Don’t just throw words together, but tell stories people want to read.

Our article distribution service has been designed to serve this type of content best. And we are always working on improving our systems in ways that can help our clients in the search engines.

We don’t distribute articles to article directories on purpose. With an article directory, one has to hope a publisher is navigating that directory to find articles they want to publish. Instead, we send articles directly to the publishers, webmasters and bloggers who are looking for content to publish.

Article Marketer, Submit Your Article, and Isnare are good at getting articles into directories. We decided that we did not need to try to duplicate their efforts, so we stuck to our original goal of directly reaching  the people most likely to publish the articles we distribute.

On occasion, we use Isnare to distribute one of our articles to the article directories, but we have only done that for a dozen or so of our articles. The greatest part of our marketing success is the result of us using our own article distribution service.

If you have more questions, I will be happy to answer them for you.

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Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers
405-780-7745 M-F 9am-6pm CST