Is PR Still the King?

Mistakes That the Big Guys Can Afford and You Cannot!

It has been more than a year now since a lot of people in the SEO industry started claiming that PR is no longer as important as it used to been. Oh, well I do not trust them!
PR seams to continue to be THE KING. Probably less powerful king, but still a king that no other power can compare with.

To prove my point I will take a website from well known, competitive industry and will show you some pretty bad SEO, bad optimization which do not bring bad consequences for this site's SE results. In my opinion this happens only because of the site's truly strong PR. This website is apartments.com and it is on the top of the search results on the big G!

Common and reasonable principle in SEO is to avoid the excessive use of your key words. Well if you are a small guy this principle applies to you and you must be careful not use your key words too much - 'too good is not good'. If you are a big guy with humongous PR you can not care less. Our example site is using the term 'apartment' on it's main page, (in both plural and single forms), 244 times. Is it too much? I will let you decide - I will give you just one number - the total number of words in the Body Text of the same page - this number is 87!

But let's not be so hard on our example website and take in consideration the fact that their domain name is actually their key phrase too. It makes it 'impossible' to link without using the phrase in the link URL (forgive the big guys their lack of knowledge that such a thing as relative link exists, they are too busy thinking of themselves as great SEO experts so they do not have the time to read such things, and even if they do, they do not have to use it because their PR makes the use or the lack of use of any other SEO technique a matter of no importance). May be they are not doing anything wrong on purpose? So let forget the 80 appearances of the keyword in the hyperlink URL. Kind of hard to forget 80 appearances but let's pretend for now and see if they get excessive in other elements of their site. Elements that they totally control and change at their free will.
The results are astonishing - the words "apartment/s" are used 60 times in the ALT tags and 70 times in the link text!!!
Anybody finding this not excessive? These are truly stunning numbers!!!

Next, the guys have 87 words of text in their body area (outside of their links), not a ton of content by any standard and 70 links that contain the mentioned keyword in it - a truly amazing ratio. Almost one key-word heavy link for every word of text... I have no words to describe this.
For those that do not know what I mean - check any link page on your or other site and you will see that even on link pages, which are definitely not a good content-wise pages in our days, there are more words outside the links per every link on the page. Such tremendously strange and artificial ratio will make every search engine lift its eyebrow and then throw your site/page deep down in the results. This applies only to regular sites - the one with strong PR stay in category with different rules... apparently.

You may think that this is enough bad stuff for any site and you cannot afford more mistakes? No, not true... the Big PR guys can afford even more. Though the next points are trully minor compared to the previous ones they still add up to the picture of how bad, the bad SEO can get.

Using not valid code You may have heard that you need to validate your pages. If you have not - you must take care of this stuff from now on. If you page claims to be something it better be - ok.
The page in concern claims to be "HTML 4.01 Transitional". Unfortunately the W3C validation service found "some" errors. 107 of them to be exact... ranging from using non-existent attributes to repetition of some of the attributes. My personal favorite are errors like this on line 549 - duplicate specification of attribute "NAME". It speak for itself - it actually shouts - carelessness, carelessness.

Annoying pop-ups on the front/main page - They are not only bad SEO, they are more importantly bad experience for your visitors, bad usability, especially if you use them to advertise non related products like our friends from apartments.com do.

Tones of JavaScript standing before your text content or residing on your page in general - yes, if you are a big PR Guy you can put all you cookie writing JS code as well as your so important pop-up activation code on your mane page right next to your HUGE content, 87 words huge to be exact. For all smaller websites I suggest putting your JS in separate file and including it with a simple line like:

<script language="JavaScript" src="my_usefull_or_vistor annoying_tools.js"></script>

I will finish this with one general more than SEO mistake for which your small website will likely not get punished. The problem is that everybody will start to at least loose the benefits of using it, in the vary near future.
The use of sub-domains instead of regular folders.
The sub-domains have some legitimate uses, but as some Search Engines treat them more or less as separate websites they have been heavily exploited for SEO purposes. So my advice for all the small guys is: use sub-domains only if you have reasons other than SEO for them. Never use short term SEO strategies especially if you have been warned that they are truly short term. As a general rule - use the time to write content and/or add useful features for your visitors instead on wasting your time implementing short term SEO.

These are the things that I found analyzing only one of the big PR websites. If you still think that PR is not king try the above-mentioned techniques on some website with PR of 5 or 6. Soon enough you will have hard time finding it in the first thousand results in any of the leading Search Engines.
And do not get too disappointed from the fact that there are 2 set of rules - for the big sites and for everybody else - I know one day the Search Engines will treat everyone equally. Or may by they already do - the sites must just have the same PR... because... because the PR is the KING!!!

Finally, I want to apologize to the owners and everybody involved in building and maintaining of the site that I use in my analyses. I do find the website pretty respectable, well build and having really a lot and good content. I truly find the site very good in any other aspect other than SEO perspective. It just has so many drastic SEO flows that I could not stop myself from using it in my article. Once again my apology to everybody throwing any non-SEO related efforts in building apartments.com