In relation to the current PR update and not traffic, did you link building efforts effect your PR update? I know myself I worked on one of my PR5 sites everyday adding links, in the hopes of going to pr6 and it didn't happen. 2 of my sites I did not even touch with link building went from pr4 to 5 which was very weird. One of my sites went from pr4 to half pr5 you can see the results here. www.digpagerank.com enter the site www.lansit.com what does this mean?
well, pr and traffic are 2 diff thing. there is a misconception where most think that high pr means more traffic which is not the case. atleast not anymore. i have see sites being ranked all the way to the top with pr0 where pr5 site in the same niche with same targeted keyword is was way behind. not sure myself why pr is there for. in terms of how pr works, you get pr based on how many other sites link to you and what pr those sites carry on their own and how many outgoing links those sites have. for some site, you will need to do link building to increase pr. others might get backlinks on its own due to content which other sites find valuable.
I agree with sultanofseo; PR may be hard to get using link exchanges now but if you find related sites and get inlinks it will help SERPs and traffic.
It all depends, you have to look at their competition and what keywords they have used to get ranking in the search engines. Most successful sites I have seen do have a PR5 or higher. In my experiences I have dealt with what you are talking about. I really think have to work on what keywords I want to center on. For instance I have a non keyword site namc.us, which is a PR3 rank. Some might think that's pretty good, but I'll tell you this much, I don't get a whole lot of traffic. I bet there's tons of PR1 forums that get a lot more traffic then me. Site is fairly new though, but still PR3 site should be getting a decent amount of traffic. Each site is has different results. For instance a forum PR rank doesn't have to be huge. I've seen tons of forums that have a low PR rank and the webmaster are making a ton of money. For instance - http://www.ls1tech.com I would like to hear a lot of feedback on this topic.
I have been working on different aspects of link building strategy and the results? My traffic dropped to a fraction of what it was and one of my most popular pages got dropped entirely! I have been slowly submitting to free directories, blogs and forums in my niche, some do follow and some not like Yahoo answers. I have been writing two or three articles per week on topic with links to my website's homepage and the most popular page on my site's navbar. My exchanged links are to site in my niche ONLY, no directories or linkfarms. The only link that I can see that might have a problem is one where I paid a small fee for a text link under "resources" on a site that sells products in my niche. They have put the link sitewide resulting in a LOT of links. There are sites showing up 2nd place in the keywords that I previously ranked well for, that much fewer and less quality links than my site. Has anyone else seen this on one of their sites? What did you do about it?
I would say my link building time was an ABSOLUTE waste of time. My pr4 directory stayed at pr4, with the amount of pr5, 6 and 7 links i got for it. As for my 2 other arcade sites, they jumped in serps and traffic very well with the link exchanges but it will was not worth the time invested in it. I have learnt, and won't waste time link trading so much again, I think you are better off paying through an advertising company e.g adbrite or adsense.
i believe pr5 can reach with a good link building.after pr5 you have to put 10x efforts to achive a pr6 or a pr7.