Well I have been analysing google for a good few months now since the last 2
PR updates and have now come to the following conclucsion due to me trying completly different methods with a certain few sites :
1. Pagerank bears no importance for search engine position at all.
2. Relevant backlinks in the same sector are unimportant for serps, they are only important for pagerank. eg if you have a webhosting site and you have a PR0 and you get a one way backlink from a similar sector website which has a PR6, you can jump to a PR4 or PR5 with just one backlink. However if you have a webhosting site and have a PR0 and you have a qty of backlinks from various pagerank domains in different sectors, this will not pass pagerank onto your site but it WILL help your serps.
3. Custom content is king ! If you have ANY duplicate content then you run the risk of being deindexed or slip totally down the serps. This only applies for google though
to summarise - if you want to get a high
PR on your website then get links from relevant sector websites, but if you want to rank higher in the serps I would say that it is 10x better to have more backlinks even if they are in different sectors and have a range of pageranks and are from non spammy sites.
Example :
1. I have a site which is ranked number 4 on google for one of the worlds most broad competitive phrases and has over 35 million competitors for the same phrase and the site is a PR4 (no I won't reveal the site, but there are at least 3 different people on this site have seen this for themselves). The top google PPC ad for this keyword costs over £25 a click !
2. I have another site which is in the same sector but is PR5 and only has under 1 million competitors and is not even in the top 100 results on google.
Site 1 has numerous backlinks from various non spammy sources, and not in the same sector, with my anchor text as my link and site 2 has a much smaller amount of backlinks but from higher
PR websites, hence why it is a PR5.
I feel people concentrate too much on the visual
PR in the tool bar, and should be concentrating more on the serps results as a result from the 100's of backlinks that they should be building for themselves.
What would you rather ? A Pagerank 6 site which ranks nowhere on google or a Pagerank 1 site which ranks very well on google ?
No brainer really ! if anyone wants more help / clarification then feel free to PM me
