I'm quite new in SEO but I have some basics, so my opinion:

Content is indeed important, make sure you don't copy paste texts from other sites and refresh or add extra content. But I don't believe that having a "good/interesting/..." content will help you directly. Remember that the googlebot is still a program. It can only compare with other sites not add an opinion "good/bad".

A question still not clear, what is the best:

Have 20 high quality sites linking to your website

OR

Have those same 20 high quality links + 180 junk

?

Kind regards!

CSC - think of it this way. If you are a site that is about Plasma TV's and all the folks that link to you are personal bloggers or sites about automobiles --- how relevant are these links?

If on the other hand, the links are from other sites that have solid page ranks and and are about consumer electronics, televisions and similar - this is more value.

Google wants all of it's ranked sites to be relevant for the user. Therefore if all your links are "junk" - google says this is not very relevant. If all your links are related - and relevant, your site is rewarded.

It all goes back to relevance -- which is why spam links are worthless and harmful.

Another factor - the sites that link to you should have page ranks that are similar to your site or better...

--- Lastly 20 great links and 180 poor ones. that is - IMHO - slightly better than just 20 great links. BUT slightly. and if a majority of those 180 poor ones are from know spam sites --- then this could be harmful to your site.

Best advice - go for the good related links. Make sure the link tag is written in a relevant way "learn more about Plasma Televisions" is far suppior to "click here"

"It" refering to PageRank?

If so, then a more correct statement would be : Ranking in the SERPs has something to do with PageRank.

Can't say it better than Google... can we

Very good thread

I read here that SEO experts say that pagerank is not used by Google anymore.

If that's true then why they keep wasting their multimillion dollar resources to keep it alive?

That does not sounds good to me.

Google still has, and uses, its own internal PageRank algorithm. It's just that the PR value that you see on the Google toolbar is becoming more and more unreliable as far as figuring out the internal PR value Google has assigned to a page ... and G wants to keep it this way to throw SEOs off track.

"toolbar pagerank is just a measure of the power of your backlinks from sometime in the past. "
How this blog http://webhostingstart.blogspot.com/ get a PR2?
Msn 3 links and yahoo 3 links...........

Well, then how do you explain the effects of "Google Bombing". It's just a links campaign using a specific keyword that links to a website. Do you think the website with the Biography of Bush is optimized for the keyword "failure"? Not at all, but there are hundreds of thousands of links pointing to that site and using that particular keyword. Run a search for the keyword in Google and you'll see it in #1. So Page Rank IS important for ranking.

And... my website needs some ;-)

Thanks,

ES

It's funny to read all this, because in the browser beneath this one I have iwebtool's rank checker handy.

I've become obsessed with it over the last 30 to 60 days, desperately trying to get my site a PR ranking of 5 or better.

I've got a boat load of content, old content, fresh content, content content content!

Yet I have PR4 and an Alexa ranking of around 260,000

I'm obsessing over nothing, right???

I'll try to keep the iwebtool checking to a minimum this week.

Content has nothing to do directly with the Gogle PR. It's the amount of incoming links. Yes, theoretically, if you have good content, people will link to your site. The higher the PR you have achieved, the harder it is to jump to the next level. If you are obsessed with the Google PR, you should read the basics of the Google algorithm
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/