Just so that it is clear, PR value of a web page is but one factor that determines positioning in SERPs for a keyphrase search. A PR2 web page geared towards ranking highly for a keyphrase can frequently beat a PR 6 trying to do the same thing. PR value, although an important indicator, does not in itself determine SERP positioning.

Your advice is mostly directly to the "newbie" of SEO, thus I feel compelled to comment.

Renting a link from a high PR web page for the purposes of artificially inflating another web site's importance is commonly refered to as "link brokering".

Although link brokering can often be an effective PR boosting strategy, it is not, in any respect, SEO. As a matter of fact, link brokering is now being considered as a spam technique and Google has it's sights set to alleviate it's effectiveness. Both the broker and the renter will increasingly become subject to ranking penalties.

Now, the main problem with link brokering. Search engines want to provide the best web pages that satisfy a keyphrase search. Web pages that rank highly for a keyphrase search but are of little value to the searcher, and certainly not the best page for that search, flood the SERPs. This process is part of the increasing problem of seeing sub-standard web pages rank highly in comparison to better ones. Link brokering can be used as a sort of ranking scheme that needs to be carefully monitored by the search engines.

In the last four or five months, many of these ranking schemes have been dissassembled and their positioning in the SERPs have been drastically affected negatively. This is a trend that will undoubtedly continue.

So, my opinion on this matter is clear : play this type of PR boosting game at your own risk. Think of SEO as a long term, sustainable pursuit whereas a web site's contents are of most importance.

The problem is that too many people create sites that algo chase one factor or another of the algorithm, and when the weight is altered for this factor, they have to move onto another to shore it up.

Create a good well balanced site with all the basic SEO elements covered, and it will stand the test of time.

Hear hear!

Hi,

I totally agree with you :mrgreen:

thats true, you go to any market place where people want to buy ad's. Almost always they ask for a minimum requirement of a pr1.

Freddie

Even though PR can be easily manipulated, it is still a very useful tool for gauging your SEO efforts. There is usually a direct corelation between PR and the amount of traffic, number of inbound links, etc. that a site gets. It is, however, also possible to have a high PR site that gets little traffic and generates no revenue. What matters most is the bottom line, i.e. your profits.

PR matters just because it still matters to a lot of people.

OK so I have a question for you. Is toolbar PR most related to gauging SEO efforts? Or most related to gauging how sticky / linkable a site is? I guess what I'm trying to say is that how much time spent on search engine optimization is nothing if you don't have a good, well built, sticky, linkable, highly organized content site. Or at least it has been my experience that for the most part, more content sites than ecommerce sites have high PR, b/c they're more linkable.

I suppose it's a combination of both. In some cases-- esp. commercial sites -- you can only do so much to offer great content and make more sticky, so you'd have to make up by SEO.

And you have to make sure that your site has good content , or nobody will link to you

there are many checks to take your website in higher rank, like
provide unique keywords, provide best title to your site, and most important thing is directory submission, more directory submission take your website to the higher rank.

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