I think google have not left PR updating but now they are doing hidden for users. right now we can get the rank high very easy and i think google also know this. so they are doing some difficult to get rank high for webmasters. if they left PR updating for users then we will never know what is the hidden PR for any site. so we will not buy links from every one. because we dont know the rank of any site. I think the reason of not updating PR.
Same here, most of the people will. The biggest thing i hate because of the delay is that you can't make easy link exchanges with new website that should already be worth PR1 or PR2.
Same here... I've been waiting to do more link exchanges. Question is, how long will this limbo last until Google makes it clear what's going on.
I liked your post. I think quality contents rank higher not because of the "natural links". People stay longer on a page to read a quality content completely even if the content they found has not the exact info which they searched for. This is the main reason of why a quality content ranks higher. "natural links" are just a myth. Almost all of the links you see are paid.
PR means 'naff all' to me these days as it is the amount of visitors to my site that is the life blood of the sites,i mainly work to get my keywords up in google search then the visitors will increase.Visitors equal money not PR these days the Kudos that PR gave your site a few years back has gone and the only thing its good for these days are for when you are selling a site and also for selling links.
So, considering I get a few natural links to my site/s a week, does that mean someone is mysteriously paying them? Cos it sure isn't me, and I'm not asking them to link to me either.
Thanks for the question. Please note that I said almost. There are only a few famous sites like wikipedia, google, yahoo, ebay, etc. which really gain most of the links naturally. If you don't have such a giant site -most probably you don't- then there is no need to consider a few natural links from some average or low quality blogs which are operated by individuals. Also I have to clarify that "paid" does not always mean paid by cash. For instance, all of the links gained by link exchanges are also another type of paid links. Because the incoming links are paid by outgoing links. No need to mention that all of the affiliate links are also paid even if they are javascript links like adsense. So, almost all of the links are paid. If we think deeper, we can see that even the "natural" links of famous sites should be considered as paid. Because usually those popular sites invest a huge amount of money to establish and maintain their popularity. Weird but also your natural links should be considered as paid. Because if you can create high quality contents it means you had already invested money and time on your own education. A few natural links are just a very small piece of the return of your previous investments. Nothing is free and the "natural" doesn't mean "free". So, if we think deeper we should accept that all of the links are paid. If we don't have to time to think deeper, most of the links are paid. Then where are those natural links? I can't see.
Not sure I agree with you, but that is certainly an interesting way of looking at backlink building, I'd never looked at it like that before.
I think there is a big change on how GOogle updates their PR. Differ from typical updates just put thousands of backlinks and you will get PR 3-4.
I see that site referenced a lot... it _is_ actively maintained, isn't it? I'm wondering what they're checking, exactly. It seems right according to my sites, but someone updated in the minor update lottery might think it's a later date...