i have been in the online biz for about a year as well and i am making way way more than 400 a month...
I have predicted PR4!!!! (Im soo happy right now. Hope it come true) http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction?domain=http://www.angelinks.nl
I am not sure they are at all accurate - just try the famous sites. The iwebtool one seems to think www.google.com will drop in PR... and so will yahoo.com, bbc.co.uk, cnn.com... so I don't think this can be relied upon at all.
well it fairly depends on how many sites that you have linked to against the Incoming links. However the regular page rank predictors do not really take the first part into consideration. So tell me roughly how many outgoing links do you have?
It doesn't matter. The amount of OBL only determine how much PR you are going to "leak" to each site. It does not determine the actual PR of that site. What's actually is interesting are the other sites linking to him and how many OBL they have.
I'm saying that the tools (including those you mentioned) have been reliable in their reports for me in the past: I have no idea if that is the norm or simply a fluke. In fact, I'm sure that I've never had a predicted number that I didn't achieve in the next update in using the tool at iwebtool.com.
I agree with Wikipedia, it's a good generalization of how PageRank works. But I still don't agree with you A page PR is not affected by the amount of OBL, only the sites linked to are.
They aren't reliable at all. One of my websites had a predicted pagerank of 5 and it only got 3. That sucks, hard.
Are these tools accurate? NO. Do they ever guess correctly yes, but it's not very hard to do. Want to generate a lot of traffic to your site? create a "Google SERPS Rank predictor" Not page rank, SERP rank. Will it work? of course not, but build it, get some publicity for it and watch the traffic come.
I use this chart: http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-calculation-chart.php as a general guideline. Ever since the last Google update, however, it seems like it is getting harder and harder to predict what the PR of my sites will be.