help me grasp value of PR

[sitenewbie99]

Hi all

I am not sure if this is the correc forum t to ask these questions and if they are irrelevant or even stupid I apologize in advance. But first things first, I am totally new to websites and I know almost nothing yet I consider myself business savy enough to recognize that any business which allows you to buy a cash flow that pays for itself in 6 -24 months is a good business to be in. I have some money and I am eager to get started but first I got a few questions that I hope some of you veterans of the trade would be kind enough to answer for me

I would also like to mention that I am looking to get in touch with people who know the ins and outs of this business and want to possibly form a partnership of some kind. For those helpful enough to answer my questions I will try to offer some sort of incentive as well... ($$)

I read the following article http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/ and allthough I understood the concept the examples didnt really offer much in terms of what I wanted to know.


1. The examples in the above mentioned article basically deals with PR of 1,2,3,4 ...What I want to know is What if a brand new site got a single PR7 link from a page offering just one external link / 5 external links what would the PR of the brand new site get to?

(I know that no one knows the exact way this works so what I am looking for is someone who has actually experimented with this to give me their take on it)


2. whats the cash value of having a PR5 /PR6/PR7/PR8 page if any? (I read an article by Chris beasley on sitepoint where he was offered 1600$ for 20 links)

3. How hard would it be to sell PR 5/6/7/8 links of your own without involving the middleman? (looking for personal experiences, ideas on how to do it etc)

4. a few days ago there was an auction on sitepoint for the domain tammyflorian.com which was said to be a PR6. Someone said it was a fake and someone said it wasnt. I checked and it appears that the domain was an expired homepage for a vegas real estate agent. Would you be able to buy this domain and make say an adsense niche site completely unrelated to real estate and still get some value from the PR6 that the page allegedly has?
Would you be able to sell text links due to it being a PR6?

5. How do you value a domain that has a pagerank of 4/5/6/7/8 but has no traffic and no content?

6. I have browsed some forums and I see people talk about their sites being a strong PR 6 or a weak 7. All I am able to find is tools that offer just a numeric value and no indication of whether its a strong or weak one. Can anyone tell me where I can find such a tool?

7. it seems evident that if you get just one strong PR site to point to your site it will help your PR alot. But what if you have say a hundred PR4 pages point to your site instead of one PR7 or 8? what would improve a new pages PR most?

8. aside from being able to sell links the value of PR is that your page shows up higher in google when people make a search as far as I understand. From my experience this doesnt seem to hold up. I have a website in a very small niche and my site is a PR 3 while one of my competitors is a PR1 yet his site ranks way higher in google than mine. Why would this be? as far as I can see our sites are pretty much the same in terms of text and the service we offer. (obviously iam doing something wrong here so feel free to give me some tips on what I might be doing wrong)

answers to some of these questions and anything else you consider relevant and interesting to someone looking to start investing in some sites would be hugely appreciated.

thanks for your time.

[thegypsy]

Well I can't really help you much other than to say I don't give a DAMN about TBPR... the Google ToolBar PR is a oft updated metric that is merely a soft representation of the REAL PageRank..

Because of these and other reasons TBPR isn't really a metric of much value.

Are you looking to make a living selling text links or something? That is one of the few values of PR really.... it certainly doesn't gaurantee a high ranking by any means.

Now that Google is getting sticky about paid links.. that business model becomes even muddier....

http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/The-Google-Toolbar-PageRank-Demystified.html

So what kind of business are you looking at getting into anyways? It's all about traffic... the best source of traffic for the best ROI on the marketing $$$ is SEO. This is about ranking for money terms that bring in the traffic (which we hope to convert).

Ranking is not dependant on PageRank.. add that to the fact we never have the straight goods on a site's PR and you start to see why it's value as a metric is limited...

[tomcatuk]

Blimey - a big list of questions! Number 8.....

PR is Google's rating of the "importance" of a page. They won't tell you what they think it's important for though. So a page with PR1 can rank above one that's PR 4 for a certain keyphrase. Basically PR isn't an indicator of a pages' weight for any one particular keyword.

[perulinks]

1) What I want to know is What if a brand new site got a single PR7 link from a page offering just one external link / 5 external links what would the PR of the brand new site get to?

There is a website called URL Trends that attempts to use a math formala to answer these types of questions. I call this ratio simply the “UT” ratio. I don’t know the formula, but to try out, go to this website (urltrends.com) and search for this two examples: perulinks.com (PR 4 with 5 outgoing links UT=1.600%) and perulinks.com/pages/english (PR 5 with 151 outgoing links UT=0.258%)

According to URL Trends, Each Link Receives Approx. 0.680 PR in the first case and 0.028 PR in the second case. This first URL is close to your website example but not the same. I’d need to have URL trend’s formula to figure it out your specific example.

PLEASE NOTICE this would work if “everything” was the same, which in an imperfect world won’t. Some SEO experts theorize that PR is not determined only by these two variables (PR and outgoing links), but by other factors as well:

- The age of the website (one variable you kept constant).
- Type of domain extension (e.g. a .GOV worth more than a .COM, and .COM more than .NU).
- Weather the links comes from related websites (if you get a link from a website with a high PR but with an unrelated subject, your PR will not be as good as if the incoming link was from a related website).
- Many other factors to mention here.


2) whats the cash value of having a PR5 /PR6/PR7/PR8 page if any? (I read an article by Chris beasley on sitepoint where he was offered 1600$ for 20 links)?

Every website has a “cash value”, but the PR system is no the way to measure it. You can have two websites of the same PR, but one can make a lot of money if is written in English and it deals about mortgages (to give you an example) than another website with the same PR but that is about Christian songs in Portuguese -- the “spiritual value” would be different though.

If you try to use exactly the same method to make money for both of these websites (e.g. Google AdSense), you will be making a lot more of money with the first one but very little with the second one.


3) How hard would it be to sell PR 5/6/7/8 links of your own without involving the middleman? (looking for personal experiences, ideas on how to do it etc).

I think the most difficult thing is to get to PR 5 and above. If you get a webpage higher than that, then you have to worry about making your own web marketing campaign to sell them. The best way to do this is to get directories with software connected to PayPal to sell it from there.

4) A few days ago there was an auction on sitepoint for the domain tammyflorian.com which was said to be a PR6. Someone said it was a fake and someone said it wasnt. I checked and it appears that the domain was an expired homepage for a vegas real estate agent. Would you be able to buy this domain and make say an adsense niche site completely unrelated to real estate and still get some value from the PR6 that the page allegedly has?
Would you be able to sell text links due to it being a PR6?

I checked tammyflorian.com with http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html and the website appears to be Ok -- of course that’s a very quick way to check the legitimacy of the PR. It’s my opinion that if you buy a domain name because of its high PR, the website you build should be related to the original topic. Google will notice if you make a website of an unrelated topic. Also, the domain in this case describes well what the business used to be. I think that some people might be skeptical to buy links from there if you make a floral shop website a page about mortgage. At least I would. I am not saying that idea won’t work, but at least I am not sure if I’d do something like that…


5) How do you value a domain that has a pagerank of 4/5/6/7/8 but has no traffic and no content?

You still have to use conventional wisdom, and then add the additional value of a high PR and traffic. Still, the most important thing is not to forget the basics: Does the domain name describe well the business type? Is it easy to remember? Does it have a good extension (.COM recommendable)? Is it already listed in DMOZ? How many words I make up of? Does it have a hyphen?, etc.


6) I have browsed some forums and I see people talk about their sites being a strong PR 6 or a weak 7. All I am able to find is tools that offer just a numeric value and no indication of whether its a strong or weak one. Can anyone tell me where I can find such a tool?

I am not sure I understand the question. You mean, tool that will tell you the value of a domain name or a website? Are you talking about a dollar amount?


7) It seems evident that if you get just one strong PR site to point to your site it will help your PR a lot. But what if you have say a hundred PR4 pages point to your site instead of one PR7 or 8? what would improve a new pages PR most?

It’s very difficult to answer a question such as that one (100 PR4s versus one PR7 or PR8). Again, your questions are too general. There are many other important considerations. You can try (1) above, but then you have also realized is not just the PRs but also the number of outgoing links. Even these two variables don’t show you the whole picture. However, the method I described in (1) above is the easiest one to figure out these types of question. I don’t have the math formula though, but that’s something that can be figured out.


8) There can be many factors, but it sounds like you might need a search engine optimization job (for example, check the keyword density for relevance of the keywords for the search terms you are talking about). Also, check the outgoing links to your competitors. Do they have links with the same keywords for the Google search results you are talking about? Maybe your competitors have strong deep-links too. This is also very, very important. You should get only about 40% of your links to your home page and the rest of to other webpages inside your website. This is needed because this is the natural way a good website is usually liked to, that is, people link to sections of your website, not always to your home page. If you have many links from directories, make sure the URLs change a little bit (with www and without, for instance). Your titles and descriptions of your web site should also vary, but most links should have the same titles as the keywords you consider important.

Hope this helps,


Carlos M Chapa
OrelWeb.com

[trichnosis]

2. whats the cash value of having a PR5 /PR6/PR7/PR8 page if any? (I read an article by Chris beasley on sitepoint where he was offered 1600$ for 20 links)

i dont agree with this. if yu work good, you can get a pr 5 for free like me. i have only made free directory submission