Thank You! I may have got a bit off topic and I apologize to the OP for that. I just remember how much I used to go nutz over pagerank. Just to put in all this work (links) and have google come knock me from a PR 4 to a 2. Man would I get pissed... Then finally I stopped worrying about it and starting focusing on keywords that my comp. missed etc. That's what finally got me to the top of the listings.. @op If you can get dofollow links on their sites/blogs/forums then, by all means go for it. They will defiantly help in the long run. Just don't go crazy over the PR as I used to because it will only make your worries worse. Besides IMHO 98% of web users don't even know what it is. They simply click on the first few sites relevant to there search. Here's another example of a 0 PR site i have since the New Years PR update. It was a PR2 before the update. It's a seasonal product site... Well although G striped the PR it hasn't affected my sales/search results ranking 1 bit. I'm still doing a couple hundred a day in sales and I'm in a VERY competitive nich. However like I said I went after the keywords my comp. missed. and go after the G images results.. with keyword alt tags on the pics. I have ruled my comp for that as well. Can you say top 3 pics for that keyword for "years" brings in big time traffic=$.... I would rather have a PR0 site in the #1st, 2nd, 3rd position then a PR 5 in the #8th, 9th, or 10th position... right? Page optimization and keywords are KING. IMHO There's sites out there that will give you a free report on how well your site/page is optimized. 1 in particular used to crack me up cause it reported that my site was 98% optimized and google{dot}com was at 78%...lol I had out done G... yeah right..lol Here's 1 tool but search around there are a few other that are way better i just can't recall them now... www(dot)seoworkers(dot)com/tools/analyzer.html Good Luck and I hope this helps! Sorry for the novel... It's just that PR really gets under my skin!
Of course it helps. 10 years ago I started with two websites and this is exactly what I did. I went through all the sites of the top of Google and MSN I wrote to the webmasters and 88 the links back and now I have excellent search engine rankings. 10 years later and I had tried to start another three or four sites and build backlinks in the same way but nobody is replying. Competition is much harsher now and everybody is aware of what's going on plus people see the value of selling their links they just want to sell your links at this business of no follow his everywhere. What I'm doing is to try to put comments on blocks which have to follow links and in that way build my PageRank.