Claiming to become a top SEO freelancer, yet in the dark about the difference between PR (Page Rank) and SERP? Never mind, such slips do occur even amongst seasoned SEO professionals. In any case, this blog post will make the picture so clear that you would probably wonder why such a simple issue had escaped your attention so long.Incidentally, whenever you ask any marketer what PageRank actually stands for, the usual response would be “Isn’t it the position of your website in Google?” But that is half the truth.

What Exactly is PageRank?

To be precise, PageRank is a numeric value that reflects the importance of a page on the World Wide Web. You may also consider it as Google’s rating or perhaps ‘grade’ for your webpage that starts from 1 and goes up to 10. However, on its own, PageRank doesn’t carry much weight. It’s something like the grade that the teacher endows you for a particular examination. But then, the grade you have earned in one particular exam seldom determines your final result for the whole year. The situation is the same with PageRank. Notwithstanding the fact that PageRank plays some part in Google’s privileged ( read highly secretive) algorithm, there is a plethora of factors that help determine how high your website ranks in Google’s search engine results. What is more, results are perpetually based on keywords. Got the point?

What About SERP?

SERP, as you well know, stands for Search Engine Ranking Page. It usually concerns the (first) page of results that Google gives you in course of your search for a keyword or keyword combination. For instance, if you have the No 4 slot in the First page of Google on ‘social media marketing’, it will boil down to the fact that that your site has SERP 4 on this express combination of keywords.

To be More Specific

• PageRank is the grade (1 to 10 OR 0 to 10) a webpage gets from Google, while

• SERP concerns the position of a website in Google’s Search Engine Results based on certain keyword combination.

Also, Let’s Visit the Forum to See What Others are Saying

• Roger: PR is Page Rank which is defined by quality inbound links from other website or web-pages to a web page or website as well as say the importance of that site.
  SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page is the placement of the website or web-page which is returned by search engine after a search query or attribute…

• Steve: Pagerank was introduced 1996 and at that time it was an important factor of determining importance of webpages in Google eyes but as search engine algorithm  got more smarter it had become less important than what it used to be. The highest PageRank a website can yield is off 10 and lowest is 0.
  SERP is called search engine ranking page; for example: if your website is ranking 11 position then 11 will be your SERP.

• Copperman: I would like to correct with this: SERP is not search engine ranking page but its search engine result page every time you search on Google the result it brings and the rankings obtained by the search results are called SERP of that websites.
  And PageRank is nothing but just a number which Google uses to grade a website same as we get a report card at school it can be any number between 0-10 and it depends upon number and the quality of inbound links.