It seems like around 5 years ago my websites reached pr 3 or 4 easily with not much link building, and now this requires a lot more effort. Is this true at all, or am I just imagining it?
Logically speaking... since the websites with higher ranks would be much more in quantity than earlier, it should be easy to get more backlinks from them but there are also more people running after them... thus neutralising the additional availability. I do not think things have become harder... or even easier! Regards, RightMan
PageRank measures a site's relative importance within the web so if there are a lot more links out there than before then you would need more links to stay at the same PR level. So it probably takes more links to get a PR5 than it did 5 years ago.
Yes changes have happened and google's algorithm is a little more strict these days, just focus on QUALITy link building and you shouldnt have any problems reaching your PR levels.
Even the PR is pretty much harder to archive these days, the fake PR building is still works and I wonder why? Based on my own opinion, the PR is not solely about number of backlinks as it used to be but some kind of "authority" involved. I cannot describe how authority could be but many websites got high PR without a tons of links pointing into it, only a few quality one like being mentioned in news from CNN.com.
If I were to base in my own experience then I'd say yes. PR is harder to acquire these days and it is not the same as before. Say, you create a blog with new fresh content and with the proper SEO, you instantly get a PageRank of 3. These days, there has been a lot of factors that Google considers when giving out PageRank.
I think it all depends on the quality links that you get. Some say they get PR in less than 2 months with few links.
PR is not at all harder to obtain. You just need some high pr links. i was able to achieve pr4 easily in just 1 update. just get some high pr6 or pr7 links. And you will easily pr4. but be sure that it is related to your theme that will help a lot to you.
Oh that's all, just get some PR 6 and 7 links...you make it sound so easy. I guess you could pay for them.
I am not sure. Of course, if you don't pay much attention to Google PageRank, then it may get easier to obtain a higher one.
There were fewer sites built before and the competition for link juices isn't not crowded so basically acquiring a link from a web page with not much outbound link, can keep the link juices compact, thus leading to a greater percentage of it shared. Nowadays, world wide web is already crowded, which means a typical web page links out to an average of 50 different sites causing the partition of link juices fewer than it used to plus the implementation of nofollow and link prominence. Thus, linking from them should be in a mass to achieve PR. PR isn't really hard to get if you can find your way to discovering those pages with less than 10 outbound links and put your links.
Based on my experience it still the same. But it still hard to get high PR I can't push my sites and blog to get up on PR 5 further...
you can get up to pr 2 very easily ,but beyond that Google getting more strict - if you are the leader of any sector with unique concept,you will get quick PR ,otherwise you have to implement all seo technique to get PR.
I always experience this everytime I create new blogs with blogspot.com. Google seem a bit bias with their services. I usually notice a newly created blog turns pr 2 from pr 0 from being unranked. And with usually a thousand quality baclinks, especially with link exchanges, PR 3 is achievable. Beyond than, needs massive SEO effort. This is something new to me. Thanks for sharing.