Ok so I often see that people say that google PR is becoming less and less useful. But my question is, how on earth can you decide on what is a useful way of analyzing whether a page is a good place to put your link. I know that relevancy is always a key factor in deciding where to put your link. A link on a page that is highly related to your site is way more useful than a page that is not related to your site, obviously. But if google takes out PR then how can you decide where to put your links?! Number of backlinks to the page is not a good way of deciding this as they could just be a lot of spammy links from random places. So my question is, what are your thoughts on this? If google take out PR then how do we decide (apart from relevancy).
Although Google are paying little attention to PageRank gradually, it is still an important factor when it comes to SERP, link exchanges, etc. So, apart from relevancy, I think we can take PR into consideration when we decide where to put the links.
Apart from relevancy... backlinks to the page and the traffic/visitors to the site! Regards, RightMan
You're just getting the wrong idea... When people say that PR is becoming less useless, I guess they mean you don't have to be sick worried about your PR, Wait for the PR update and stuff. It is just a number. That number actually keeps changing, going up and down all year... But you only see 4 changes of it. So just do SEO and build good content and don't worry about the PR.
Fortunately or unfortunately, but the PR is the only feedback we have directly from Google, so it would be rush to ignore it. There are a lot other factor we could use also: backlinks number, domain age/history, OBLs on page and so on, but evaluation of them comes from our own experience.
I came across some great directories and websites that are low in PR but high in SERP. I have also come across some PR 5 and 6 directories that Google does not crawl anymore due to abuse and spam. I guess it is a gut feeling what is good and what is not as well as some research of your competitors It's all well and good to say ignore pagerank from now, but let me give you a quick example of the problem. I recently changed my domain name to my current site address. The old site was ranking PR3. My new site doesn't have a rank assigned yet. And let me tell you, regardless of what content is on the site (it's way better than my old URL was when it got PR3 in April), people with PR3 and higher just do NOT want to do link exchanges with PR NA sites!!!! Now what do I do about that? It's not possible to change people's perceptions overnight, and it means that good quality sites with low PR are kind of stuck. There needs to be more fanfare around this change in policy. Not every web master stays in touch with these kinds of developments on a regular basis.
PR is dipping in popularity thesedays. Relevance is a key when choosing to place your links, apart from that you should also look at traffic..