Just how important is PR over content in SEO?

I’m a newbie to SEO and am wondering how important Google PR is against rich content? I am in the midst of a backlinking campaign which is a slow and tiresome process. How much importance does Google actually place on PR over content and domain relevance? Any tips for good backlink building greatly appreciated…

Content is definitely the first and foremost aim you should be focusing on. You won’t be able to get a high page ranked without having good content, it really is as simple as that. It’s the same for people who have keyword rich domains, they have amazing domains but the content lacks, Google see this and push them down in the rankings. Focus on the content and then get a good domain with low competitivity. In my experience i have found if you do something unique, you’re more likely to get ranked higher and have less need for useless backlinks.

Totally agree with Siick26 if you don’t have reach content mean you don’t have enough KP’s for your business. In such a case its so difficult to get PR

PageRank itself gets very little consideration these days – basically, once Google published any details of it, it became far too easy for people to manipulate, and so it increasingly showed sites that had spent time and effort on gaming the system rather than those that were genuinely popular and worthwhile. That isn’t to say that your link profile isn’t important, but it’s a much more subtle approach now than just looking at your PageRank. In a nutshell, any link that it’s easy for you to get through a link-building campaign is pretty much worthless, so it’s unlikely to be a good use of your time. Far better to concentrate on creating great content and a great all-round user experience, so that people want to keep coming back to your site, and sharing it and recommending it to others.

Rich content is like getting your house painted. Even if the foundation is strong (on page SEO) the finishing touch that is visible to the eyes makes all the difference between you and your neighbor (competitor sites). Unique content is a must. But then, how will Google find the content if not for inbound links (link building). So here are some evergreen methods and some new methods listed for you:

  • Blogs (preferrably on your own site)
  • Guest blogs
  • Social media links from review sites, video sites, image sites, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, document sharing sites
  • Authorship on Google+ and links from Google+ (If Google SEO is important to you)
  • MEANINGFUL blog comments and fourm comments associated with relevant links
  • DMOZ and handful of quality website directories (not that important but not extinct yet either)

So those are some of the best evergreen link building methods. Please feel free to suggest some more if i may have missed them.

Your aim should be to create a great content, where it can get natural links. Other type of link building work may bring you some short term PR and exposure, but the search engines are getting smarter day after day. So, in a year or two they can probably tell the different between a natural link and an artifical link. Definitly natural links would win over time, so put your most aim on the content and make sure it’s the best of its kind. BTW, this is my first post over here at sitepoint! happy that I joined.

Thank you guys, some great posts here and some very valuable information. You have all confirmed what I had hoped was true - content is king. We’re ranking higher at the moment after a series of mods to content but our PR hasn’t changed so I a was guessing google liked the new accessibility around the site and of course the content. Thanks again this is a great community…!

good content able to catch the attraction of people. A good content make different from other site itself .Traffic is increase naturally thus getting high PR.

I consider PageRank a reward for years of hard work, and think about getting real people visiting my site first. Over time, they will keep coming back if I am doing my job right and traffic will grow. As traffic grows, people will link to me and I will see an increase in pagerank.

Google use about 200 different algorithms to rank pages in their search results.

The PR (named after Google founder Larry Page) used to be more important but has beecome so easy to manipulate that it is now effectively the last algorithm on Google’s list and gets applied only if a tie treaker is required after all the other algorithms have been applied.

PR is a specific Google algorithm for ordering the pages on the web based soley on the number of incoming links, the PR of the pages those links are on and how many links are on those pages. It has nothing whatever to do with what is being searched for and so none of the links need to be relevant to the page in order to get counted for PR. The algorithn that compares the subject matter of the page to those that link to it in order to determine the relevance of the link is far more important than PR.

As most of you know, PageRank is an algorithm that calculates a web metric which shows how reputable a particular page is according to Google. This rank depends not only on the quality and the quantity of the incoming links but also on several other parameters such as the number of outgoing links per page (on the linking webpage), the position/visibility of the links and more.

We should note here that the real PageRank values are not the ones that appear on the PageRank Toolbar. The toolbar transforms the real values by using a logarithmic (or similar) scale from 0 to 10.

SEOs invented new PageRank Sculpting techniques and Webmasters became more careful on how they sell links (fewer and more relevant links per page, careful positioning, selling links for longer periods etc). At the same time SEO professionals started to analyze the Search Engine Results and came up with new hints on how to affect the rankings.

Additionally we should also take into account that the Real PageRank values are constantly recalculated and as a result the values that we see on the toolbar are old and not very accurate. Still when the PageRank Toolbar update is recent, they can give us a clue on whether our link building campaign is working.
Due to all these factors PR is more important over SEO.