I just discovered that one of my websites has jumped up to PR4 and it has only 4 backlinks (3 of them is one way links from another site of mine, which is PR3 and the other site is PR2)

Now, my site is about the only external link at those sites, and it has never really had any more backlinks.

It doesn't even have that much content. It basically just a image directory with about 200 images. + they all have unique meta keywords and descriptions. Also, all content is original.

My site is supposed to use the www. prefix, but with www. the PR is 3. Without, www. the PR is 4.

Most of my traffic comes from google, where people search for the two words my .org domain consists of.


So does keyword rich domains affect the PR much?
What's going on here?


Edit:
I almost forgot, About 4 months ago I got an email from google telling me that they were going to remove my site from its index because spammers had broken into my server and pasted about 600 hidden sitewide links on my site. So the last thing I expected after this was my pagerank to actually rise.

Also, I stopped selling text links about 2 years ago, and I've barely ever bought them. And I've never bothered with Search engine submissions or any other kind of link building, advertising etc.

How old is your site and does it get much/ any ongoing updates.
also how many hits a day does it get

The site is about 3 years old. It hasn't really been updated at all for more than a year.
It gets about 250-300 uniques a day (82% of them from google alone) and usually about 1300 page views.

It has about 400 indexed pages on google, but all (except from less than a percent) of the hits lands on the index page.

The most of the visitors are teens looking form myspace or IM avatars

Sounds like to me your PR is driven by your traffic and obviously your service is in demand. Really is a great way to be noticed.
One of my main sites (Voip services) Is also in demand and when i posted on some major Voip Directories (As well as some paid advertising) I jumped from a 0 to a 3 in 3 months (assuming due to traffic) When I stopped my paid advertising my traffic did drop dramatically. and then dropped from a 3 to a 2. I have heaps of back links but it really is not having major affects in my PR.
What ever you are doing is working well. So I wouldnt change to much.

I thought PR was based on Backlinks (and their importance), and not Traffic, so I'm not sure how this is possible. One of my sites used to get about 500 uniques a day, and was only a PR1.

Age and the quality of content are the best explanations that I can come up with, but google's logs are so screwey these days who knows. :P

thats really possible, and since google don't show all backlinks...

Yes Google do not show all back links. If you want ot know about your all back links then you can use google webmaster tool. It will be helpful to know about many thing about your website.

The way that i have it explained about Google and PR. Is Google has a closed box of all the rules you need to do to get good PR. the box is closed and no one knows what is in there. Every body can guess at best on what the rules are, but as Google changes from time to time there is no way to know.
Basically all about guess work. Trial and error and major hrs to get it right.
Thats my theory anyway.

because of lots good unique content???

Originally Posted by Pynk Global

Sounds like to me your PR is driven by your traffic

No more than PR is determined by whether you wrote the site on a Mac.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

No more than PR is determined by whether you wrote the site on a Mac.

You are starting to turn each thread into the "ask a dumb SEO question" thread.

This might be the time to sell the site since you've haven't worked on it for a long time.

Thanks for your replies all!
But today my pr dropped down to 2! and I lost my #1 SERP positions
Could this have happened because i changed webhost? (I can't imagine how it could be)

This might be the time to sell the site since you've haven't worked on it for a long time.

I've thought about it, but I really don't want to let this domain go. And I don't think I could get a worth while offer..

First: how did you check your backlinks? Is it overall? or you check it by SE?

PR means nothing to me or millions of other people.

I have several PR3 pages that are number one in Google.

Unique content and well optimised pages are worth much more in my opinion.

I have gotten PR4 without a single backlink before, Google does occasionally toss out "content based" pageranks.