I had a couple of newer sites finally get PR today (PR5) - does anyone know what that means in terms of any potential increased traffic - does having PR now mean I can expect a certain % increase within some time period. I already had a large number of pages within these sites indexed, so the PR is nice, but now what?

A change in PR won't bring any additional traffic.

The serps update all the time, The green bar PR is more like a report card on what already happened.

So why should we even care about PageRank then?

I find the discussion on PageRank very confusing. Google makes it sound like its the "be all-end all" of search results but most SEO's think it is grossly overrated.

I'm confused, can someone help me?

-Ryan

PR *does* matter, but we don't see it updating constantly on the bar. Google's algo takes the PR into effect every time a query is made, and the PR is updated constantly.

The PR bar had not been updated for 100 days, but the SERPs were always moving. PR is not the "be all-end all" of high placement though. You attain PR from the number of inbound links you have, but your ranking comes mainly based on the text in those links. Make sense?

I just thought of soemthing. Im a moderator at another forum with a PR of 5 and I have about 3500 posts there. If I link my site in my sig will Google count that as 3500 links to my site since the link is posted in each post of mine? Or does it disregard multiple links from the same site?

they will count in the link:yoursite.com search, but you won't get any value after 5 or so.

But If I was opening a brand new site (which Im fixing to do), it would be an advisable cheap trick? I mean, it wouldn't take but about 5 sceonds of effort on my part.

Yeah, it wont hurt, thats for sure.

PR never meant what traffic does the site gets.
It denotes the quality of the website among its peers.
It is a cool badge every site wants to wear. that's all.

It's the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) which is more important.

Also because of "the great PR chase" it makes getting link partners more easy due to people only wanting to exchange links with sites that have good PR, concentrate on increasing the number of relavant links to your site and the PR will follow.

As for having links in forums there has been some discussion as to whether or not they pass PR and help rankings. If the forum is on a related topic to your site, having links in your sig is a great way of increasing traffic as everyone on the forum is interested in the topic (also being moderater will give you "expert status" to any viewing your threads) dont forget links by them selves can bring traffic to a site, some of our best traffic comes from a number of links we have on similar sites.

Originally Posted by andyc23

I just thought of soemthing. Im a moderator at another forum with a PR of 5 and I have about 3500 posts there. If I link my site in my sig will Google count that as 3500 links to my site since the link is posted in each post of mine? Or does it disregard multiple links from the same site?

It won't hurt, but it won't help a whole lot either. Typically, under 15% of my total signature links in all the forums I post in are reported as links by Google.

Only 15%? I see around 80% of the threads I post in.