Maximum PR for your Topic and Keywords

You’ve just finished making the hottest site on a niche topic - let’s say - paper clip and staple sculptures. You promote your site to the max, get hundreds of linkbacks. You have massive traffic and after a year expect to have reached PR10. Your site is now the biggest and best for its topic - it would only make sense that your sit with a PR of 10.

The end of your 1st year comes, and you find you only have PR4. What a disappointment! 

What’s more disappointing is the fact that PR4 may be the highest PR you can ever achieve for the topic you’re writing about. It seems like Google’s PR calculations do not take your topic or even your specific keywords into account as much as they should.

Let’s look at an example. Formula One is one of the most watched sports in the world. It comes in not far behind soccer (football). On an individual event basis it can even eclipse it.

The official site for Formula One is www.formula1.com. Not only should this site be considered the most important F1 site, you’d expect it gets a huge percentage of overall web traffic based on the popularity of F1 as a sport. Here’s the killer:

formula1.com only has a PR of 7!!

What chance does this give F1 enthusiast sites of getting a PR even above 4? If you look at the other big F1 sites, you’ll see their PRs tell a similar story:

• planetf1.com - PR6
• itv-f1.com - PR6
• f1-live.com - PR5
• f1racing.net - PR5

All these sites feature on the first page of results in Google when searching for the term ‘f1′ and are very high for a search on ’formula one’.

An idea - it might be better for Google to work on a keyword-based PR. But that would simply be a parallel to your SERP now wouldn’t it?  Does this mean PR is useless then?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Page Rank, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.