For you Information: Pagerank has nothing to do with ranking on Google. You need to know this before continuing to post saying Pagerank determines where your site ranks in the search engines. To rank higher on Google you need to increase your backlinks with whatever anchor text you are targetting; i.e: gardensworld.com anchor text would be something like gardening etc...

Pagerank is not how it used to be. I can see PR1 websites outranking PR5 websites in search engines. Pagerank has minimal effect on how your website ranks on Google.

Hi Matt

Not sure where you saw us say Page Rank determines your search engine position. Page Rank just shows how Google determines your sites importance regarding back links to the site, age of site etc.

I strongley disagree, of course page rank determines where you rank its one of the most important factors Google, its not the be all and end all but a PR4 site optimised correctly will rank higher than a PR1 or PR2 site, please note Matt that I stated optimised correctly , any good web designer will do onpage SEO as they build their websites not 2 years later for an extra fee!!

Good forum by the way...

Both answers can be correct. When building a new site we keep SEO in mind, and when the site is launched and has no back links or page rank, it still ranks high in most search engines.

Now to get higher or consistent results in lets say Google, then we would recommend getting back links from similar content websites. Where some people go wrong with how to use back links and page rank is getting back links from sites with no pr or worse still a back link from a penalised website.

So in a nut shell, seo would be step 1 and then back links and the relevant pr it gets step 2. One helps the other but it is not set in stone that a high pr site will or should rank high.

Google describes PageRank

“ PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important". ”

In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The PageRank is derived from a theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale like the Richter Scale. The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank.[citation needed] In order to prevent manipulation, spoofing and Spamdexing, Google provides no specific details about how other factors influence PageRank.

Getting a backlink from a penilised/excluded website is not harmful, after all how can you control who lonks to you? This is only a danger when you link to an excluded website .

My apologies that is correct and what was meant to be typed. It is harmful to link to penalised sies. Not if they link to you.