Here's a great example showing that it takes more than just a higher PageRank to be the #1 result in google for a given query. If you do a search for freitag on Google, you will notice that freitag.ch (the guys that make Freitag Bags, page rank of 4) beats my blog petefreitag.com (page rank of 7).
This does show that PageRank is perhaps not as important as we all may like to think. Let's look at some reasons why they may be beating me:
- Their domain name is an exact match of the query (freitag.ch), mine is a partial match petefreitag.com. Also notice that freitag.com is the 7th result, and has a PageRank of 3.
- The first word in their page title is Freitag, it's the second word in mine, actually I use Freitag's.
- The anchor text in links pointing to their site may contain freitag more frequently, than links to my site.
- Google may have found that people are more interested in Freitag Bags when they search for freitag and sorts the results accordingly.
By the way Freitag means Friday in German.
Comments
I doubt it would have much effect.
Hey Peter In regards to your first point - your domain name is not even a partial match. The way I understand it searches for "top" will not match "desktop" at all, although they would partially match "desk-top". Apart from that I think you're pretty much correct. PR is a factor, but relevance is the key. Maybe register peter-freitag.com and see if anything changes. Also add Peter Freitag to your title's and headings. I suspect you would then see a big difference. But hey, is this blog really about you or is it about technology? Cheers Mark
If page rank were everything then surely Adobe and Apple would come out top for everything (I know some people who might think this is a good idea!). From recent articles that I read, it seems like the page rank is gaining increasing weight in the SERP and less relevance is given to thing like having keywords in <h1>tags</h1>, and since google is tweeking its weights and algorithms all the time, theres no guarentee that todays rank 1 site will still be there tomorrow, even if nothing has changed in the content or PR of the top sites for your keyword. I do agree with the comment above that the age of the site has a lot to do with the rankings. My new site, http://www.milanclothing.com is still on PR 0 despite having lots of recipricol links, a lot of which are from similar sites, and we have a couple of PR6 sites that link to us too. However, we're still in the PR0 doldrums and its really frustrating (see my blog at http://mykeblack.blogspot.com/ for more suggestings to get better rankings with RSS and google sitemaps). I think the wait and see approach is the best bet for now, and concentrate your efforts on getting up there in the other search engines like yahoo and MSN, then after your site has been online for 6-8 months, go for the google throat with some nice clean w3c validated code, and some strategically positioned reciprical links. good luck! Myke Black mykeblack@gmail.com http://www.mykeblack.com