When PR update does happen, and you happen to go from zero to like 4, will you see a substantial increase in traffic? Thanks
in theory NO. PR does not affect the amount of people on your site, the SERP does. You can be sandboxed in google with a PR of 4 so you will not get any extra people on the site.
Bob's list is very accurate in predicting the updates: http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/page-rank-update-list.html
The visable toolbar PR is usually weeks (or more) behind the interanl PR that google uses, so the answer to your question is no. May make it easier for you to obtain link exchanges tho.
As per my experience. Jump of PR from 0 to 4 is good, as long as the backlinks are going to be as is for a long period of time. A good PR give the website a stamp of genuinity and works wonders as time progresses.
The only traffic increase you wil see after a PR update from 0 to 4 is in the form of people who will come to your site to exchange links with your high PR pages.
This brings up an interesting point... What PR level DOES your site need to see a boost in traffic when jumping from 0? Would a jump to 6 do it? Is PR really that worthless that it won't matter?
Thats what I was wondering George. I thought the with the manifestation of PR you would start to see your site show up on the SERPs. Is it just a game to get other people to trade links with you to get even higher meaningless PR? Surely a PR 7 site is completely exempt from the sandbox. Right?
heh, this is what I was thinking too.. But those link exchanges could also give you more directed traffic, so it's not really bad..
The PR update is completely Cosmetic. All that is updating is how long the bar is on your screen. The SERPs change daily, and you are already seeing the changes before google does a PR update and you jump from whatever to whatever, you would have already been seeing the results of the inbound links in the SERPs. As far as having a certain PR and being exempt from the sandbox, I have a PR5 still in the sandbox.
That's what happened to me, went from 0 to 4 and not in the G serps. Site is only 2.5 months old. There was no traffic increase from Google at all. Not that it was expected anyway. J
Same with me, I'm not ranking very good in SERPs, although I got a good PR. I just can't imagine how you can get hundreds of visitors each day just by Google...
Toolbar PR doesn't effect your rankings in Google directly. Most SEO's hold that PR no longer has any ranking weight. What PR does show you is how many inbound links you have an how many inbound links the pages have that your inbound links are from. Also PR is good for showing if you are under a penalty or ban. If it drops from PR6 to a PR4 or so or even a PR0 and there has not been a Toolbar PR update you may be under a penalty.
A long time ago (in internet time that is), google moved to what is known as everflux. This means that the benefit of backlinks anchor text etc is applied as soon as the page carrying the information is cached. So the moment the page carrying your backlinks is indexed in google and the cache is current, your getting the benefit. Google has not one but two page rank systems running constantly. 1) The page rank value they use as part of the determination of ranking (server side) 2) The page rank value they use for displaying on the toolbar, (plays no part whatsoever in ANY google algorithm as it is a mickey mouse value) Once you get your head around this, you will see why the bulk of SEO's do not get excited about page rank and backlink updates. Simply because they are of cosmetic benefit at best, giving false hope to many at worse
I don't disagree at all with the statement that the Toolbar PR value is inaccurate except possibly for a few minutes / hours / days after a Toolbar PR update. In fact, on this forum and others, I have said exactly that many times. But that's quite a different statement than saying, as BM did, that "PR no longer has any ranking weight". PageRank still matters. But most of the time nobody but Google really knows what the PageRank of any page actually is at this moment in time.
How about this a new "GAME"; everyone turn off pagerank indicator, and we play "Guess this Sites Pagerank" Could be very interesting.... -PYJAMA
Could you be a little more specific? Links to where these "top names in SEO" have said that Google has abandoned PageRank as a ranking factor? preferably with a bit of evidence attached?