I couldn't agree more. Pagerank is an important factor, but relevancy, in my opinion, is nearly as important. Whether or not it's 'no-follow' is important. Neighborhood is also a factor. For some articles, I agree. But I'm a believer in article marketing as well, for more exposure, the the possibility of new backlinks and traffic that you wouldn't get otherwise.
That depends on your perspective, and what you are trying to accomplish. If you want to build up a reputation and do some branding in your niche, then I agree. If you want to improve your SERPs, then PageRank is probably more important. I'd rank relevance just behind pagerank in order of importance.
What does every real SEO and link builder tell you to get? Quality relevant links from sites related to yours within your industry/market/niche/topic. The PageRank will come later by itself.
Wow, you almost quoted my signature word for word! I think the difference between what you are saying and what I am saying is very minimal. Relevancy is very important. I've been an SEO professional for fortune 500 companies for about 10 years now, and what I say is to build links from qualtiy, relevant sites with good pagerank that don't use the no-follow tag. If you get links on relevant sites with no pagerank, or on relevent sites with good pagerank that use the no-follow tag, it's not going to help your SERPS much, if at all.
You know, I didn't look at your signature until you mentioned it. The simple fact is I don't care about PageRank. Google has shown they can arbitrarily determine how it's applied, and that's in addition to the fact that the toolbar PageRank is 3-4 months old by the time we see it updated to begin with. Heck, if you want to be really sneaky, find a few sites you want to link to and ask them if they'd let you do some link building for them in exchange for a link from their site. Then you can chase after PageRank the way some lawyers run after ambulances in search of their next meal ticket all you want. Oh, and this is just the Web developer in me, "nofollow" is just a value of the rel attribute, not a tag.
I agree with most of that. Especially about the toolbar being 3-4 months old. Google actually calculates pagerank continuously, on a daily basis. You can actually see your live pagerank in Google Webmaster tools. And you're right. Google arbitrarily does alot of things that aren't necessarily fair or consistent. And, if you just focus on creating terrific, unique content, and you are very active in your niche community, and get backlinks from related sites, not looking at anything else, and if your content truly is very good content, then yes, you probably will achieve some success in building traffic. That being said, if you want to maximize your effectiveness and efficiency, pagerank should be the first thing you look at. Then relevancy. When I'm looking for backlinks for me, I always need both.
I agree with most of that. Especially about the toolbar being 3-4 months old. But did you know that Google actually calculates pagerank continuously, on a daily basis. You can actually see your live pagerank in Google Webmaster tools. And you're right. Google arbitrarily does alot of things that aren't necessarily fair or consistent. And, if you just focus on creating terrific, unique content, and you are very active in your niche community, and get backlinks from related sites, not looking at anything else, and if your content truly is very good content, then yes, you probably will achieve some success in building traffic. That being said, if you want to maximize your effectiveness and efficiency, pagerank should be the first thing you look at. Then relevancy. When I'm looking for backlinks for me, I always need both. And you're right about the attribute as well.
Not really surprising, considering the traffic this time of day. Did you know that MySQL can only process 10 requests per second at most?
I don't mess with databases that much, but it wouldn't surprise me (I'm far more of a front-end developer than anything).
Yeah link exchange is the best you can do free. Check out other site traffic and PR before link exchange.
What does it mean to not get links from the same c class? I agree, though, getting relevant links are important.
it may be possible that your site is not of articles nature. Then instead of writing articles on your site go for any article site.