I often hear folks speaking of how a site is likely to rank higher down the road, often with the word "projected". Is there a place to view this? I'm getting great traffic and am looking at monetization, but it would be easier if I could tell if I would be looking at some PR love in the next update
All the page rank prediction tools are not worth the time they take to run. They are a guess at best, and almost always predict on the high side. Link sellers like to use them to help sell their links.
Projected PR comes from specialty tools. Basically it looks at your backlinks and uses historical data to predict what your PR will be after the next update. It's not 100% accurate (more like 50% accurate). An example tool is the Future PageRank tool by SEO Chat: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/ Just enter your url and the captcha text and it will predict your PR. It's extremely important to understand it's just an estimate. There is no 100% way to predict pagerank. Generally speaking, it's fairly easy to get up to PR4 on your first update, you just need a good link building campaign. Getting up to 5 and 6 requires more skill and a higher quality of backlinks. Getting 7+ PR is very difficult, not alot of people are able to do it as it requires millions of backlinks.
Ah, thank you I was wondering if I was missing something. I have 4 on a few pages, 3 on several (on other sites), but agree.. Getting up past 5 does seem to need some work and dedication. Thanks!