Lots o people think that PR is overrated. Well its not -- lets take for example www.statcounter.com - they are one of the few sites that have a PR10. How did they get a PR 10 you say? Well - they did it in a sneaky way - but I will let you guys discover for yourself as that is not the main topic. Do a google search for "invisible", "free" basically terms in their title. Look who comes up in the top 5 results? Pretty powerful to rank for invisible and free when your site has nothing to do with invisibility or free. PR powers the title - the higher the PR the more weight is given for the keywords you target - as many of us know the title tag is heavily weighted. Summary: Links (for the most part) drive PR PR powers the Title (keywords you are targeting mainly located in the title tag) So in all - get a higher PR - but DONT get it to fast - develop your inbound links SLOWLY to avoid "hollow" PR - one of my friends has a PR 7 but did it in 2-3 months -that is "hollow" pr - he is not ranking for even very low competitive keywords - DO things the right way and you will be rewarded -- remember if you are a small site...build slow - larger, established sites can gain inbound links faster without flagging the spiders.. hope this info helps -- and please invite anyone you know who has a game/entertainment themed site to the RogueDirectory.com a niche directory - The Rogue
from my point of view, 99% of people obsessed with pagerank waste tons of time, energy and resources to get well ranked without care the low quality of their traffic and the very low results in comparison to those sites not so well ranked (or not at all) but profiting above the average pagerankers.
Like you said, they rank well for "invisible" and "free" because its in their title. Basic SEO right there. They have so many links because a lot of people use their counters which includes a link back to their site.
Statcounter is great. But why would people use a counter with an image or a link when they have a free invisible counter (the one I use on most of my sites). I personally just think statcounters, etc. that are visible detract from the site itself. Is there a reason people leave it visible on their sites? If it wasn't clear, to me, since I use their Free Invisible Stat Counter, it is no surprise to me that they rank for those words.
They are tricky, I don't know how complicated it is, but even if you sign up for an invisible counter, they still get a link back to their site from you, so while they may not get visitors from invisible counters, their amount of inbound links does increase a lot.
Yep StatCounter is using some sort of noscript /script link -- i bet in the future this will be devalued - but yep they piggy back ride on users who use their script - but it is ingenious and they rank very well for all those targeted keywords
I don't think a link per page is too much to ask for a free service. Now last I heard ClickTracks was doing the same thing - that doesn't seem right.
But their site does have to do with invisible and free. They are a free invisible stats program for your site. They got great PR by establishing a great free service and requiring links back to their page. And they did it for the traffic (they charge for better plans). The best way to get high PR: good product or service and the PR will come. That's why Adobe and Macromedia have it - a great free product (PDF, Flash) that people want.
I think it's true. I new nothing of PR or SEO till recently but when I started to check out my site's - BJIJ.com PR it was 5, not so high vor just a site without any link building or SEO. It's in the first page of google for some really great keywords Now I started to take a SEO campaign and linkbuilding to get it's PR higher, but i definitly agree with what you are saying!!!
Very well said, you can't even get good link partner if you don't have good Pr link pages. Many people act that they don't care about pr but try to exchange a links with them... then you'll find " we need a pr 3 onwards link page" I have seen this in top most seo comapnies' site also.
Now let me add this - I have a friend who has a site that got a PR7 within 3 months - he should have been ranking for certain keywords (that were not competitive) but he was not - that is because he has "hollow PR" - he shot up to fast, too soon - so - when linking with someone make sure their PR is solid and not "hollow" you can typically test this in google to see if they rank within the top 5 pages of the SERPs (thats one way) - dont get dupped into buying "hollow" PR links Best of luck
hmm .... it's wierd... my webdesign site got a pr 3 but the additional pages (portofolio, services, contact) got a pr 5. I also buyes 3 months ago go4celebrity.com .. made some seo, but not to much and got a pr 6. strage
PR is over rated by some. Take this example - 100 pr5 links from a single domain and 100 PR5 links from all different domains. Both pass the same page rank but the 100 link from different domain has much more ranking benefit. The reason your friends site can’t rank is not because of "hollow PR" but the sandbox.
Interesting discussion, I've noticed that sites with higher PR consistently out gun more focused sites with lower PR when performing trial searches on Google - so unless I'm missing something, PR would seem to be very important?
Yes CCD - PR is very important ...even google mentions this on their site "PageRank is Google's system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank. " IF anyone tells you other wise - they are fooling themselves -- but also remember there are other factors involved in ranking - and you can also get "hollow PR" --