Everybody messing my priginal post with PR. Every body know now a days PR is not important from SEO point of view. But have you checked major directories. They are continuing to get paid submission from SEO sites too and those SEO sites are eminent. Most of the eminent SEO sites have 20-30 web directories and they advertise to sell PR for a junk of bucks! I'm not naming any SEO giants but I'm sure many of our friends know it. I was concerned about it because I too run some of the popular web directories where many of the talkers in this thred had submitted their site(s).

Please stop talking about PR again... at least with a SEO guy who is running most successful SEO business in India from over 2.5 years... please...

Hello Guys,

I just joined this forum, and the thing inspired me was an SEO from my fellow country, India. Ya! that's seoindia. I dont know him but it made me feel nice to see my neighbor here. Hi seoindia

Originally Posted by seoindia

Hi,
I have noticed some change in PR recently. Some of our pages went to 3-4 from 0 also some have been down to 0 from PR 3. May be PR update has begun. As you all know Google had recently updated Back links, so it's may be the time what every serious websites waiting for - another update !

No Dude, I didn't saw any PR update. According to my opinion PR is continuously updated internally, Its just toolbar update which is done after a month or two.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

PR doesn't help your site get crawled at all, the links get your pages crawled. PR is simply a by-product of links and is one of the reasons so many people get this wrong when looking at cause and effect
links and anchor text are the important factor NOT the PR.

chrishirst, If you know what PR is, you would never be saying this. Well, you admit that links and anchor text is important, so dude, PR is just the measure of "Quality and Quantity" of the backlinks. So how can u deny the importance of PR?
When someone is saying PR is important he means backlinks and their quality.

Originally Posted by chisthirs

BTW liar is spelt with a "a"

chris, Everybody here doesn't speak English naturally. so, Its extremely useless to point out spelling and grammatical errors to lay-down others.

Well, you are from UK, homeland of English, you should at least know that when addressing a singular starting with a vowel we put "an" before it instead of an "a"
So, you are wrong too. Corrected sentence is:
BTW liar is spelt with an "a"

Am I right?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

That's far far more important to me than watching the silly green bar.

Anyone remind the story "Grapes are Sour" by this? lolz, I did.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

The forum sig is actually part of a test to see if forum signature links make any difference to ranking WRT Google, and I can honestly tell you they don't. They used to up until the Feb 2005 update. At one forum I have over 3500 posts and that site had a sig link with unrelated anchor text that the target site ranked for.

Well, Many major forums only include signature links for members to see and so search engines don't even know they exist. I have examples of such forums and vice versa.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

What I am looking for there is ranking for the right phrases, this kind of approach simply does not require a link begging campaign, a few well targeted links on the same site and some appropriate copy is all that is required for that.

I will reply to your this quote later, after you tell me how much u mean by the word "few" -- You mean 10? 20? 100? .. how much?

Every body know now a days PR is not important from SEO point of view

Apparently this is not the case

They are continuing to get paid submission from SEO sites too and those SEO sites are eminent. Most of the eminent SEO sites have 20-30 web directories and they advertise to sell PR for a junk of bucks!

and does that make it the best way??
Bear in mind that Google can, will do and have in the past acted against any site or company selling advertising links on the basis or PR

I was concerned about it because I too run some of the popular web directories where many of the talkers in this thred had submitted their site(s).

Are we now seeing the real reason for your points?
That of the fact that as people begin to realise that so many of the directories that spring up on a daily basis are not worth the effort to submit, and certainly not worth the cost.

at least with a SEO guy who is running most successful SEO business in India from over 2.5 years... please...

truly I am not bothered who you are in particular and whether you want to listen to other views on links and the perceived value of PR. Maybe if you considered there are 2 other major SEs, and Ask which does have the potential to become an important source of visitors, where PR has absolutely no meaning at all but in the case of Yahoo links are also important a clearer image would be appearing.

For anyone interested;
Take off the Google blinkers and the PR tinted glasses and look at the bigger picture.

Cool so you use the logs to determine which links send you the best traffic. Good practice, exspecaily if your paying for them. It gives you useful data just like PR.

Please! What useful data can be gleaned from seeing a change is an inaccurate (-0.9 + 0.5) range of a number that is anything from 1 day to 3 months out of date? If you could see the real PR value in (almost) real time then there may well be something to be gained from watching it, which is exactly why it is not available.
There is only one useful metric when measuring the effects of link building, and that is "does the link yield a postive ROI (return on investment)". Whether the investment is in time or money (or both), you should be measuring what that link brings you, not looking to a third party figure that is practically a random number.

So, you are wrong too. Corrected sentence is:
BTW liar is spelt with an "a"

Am I right?

I stand corrected on the grammar.
However you should note that rather than taking offence at a slur on my character from someone who has never met me and has no idea who I am personally, I chose another route. I do not get drawn in by silly insults that drag down the forum and the thread participants.

PR is just the measure of "Quality and Quantity" of the backlinks. So how can u deny the importance of PR?

No, PR is the measure of the PR of the pages linking to the page, it has nothing to with quality anymore just quantity. The original idea of PR was to measure quality by the number of "votes" for a page, but that has long since ceased to be the case, now anyone with enough money can buy their supposed quality. Which is why you can see that Google is beginning to reduce the impact that links (not the PR of the links) have on their algo. If PR is a measure of "quality" is this one of the best pages on the internet?

To set the record straight, it is only the Toolbar display of PR that I see as useless, real PR is a small part of the ranking algo, but as we cannot see that, chasing a randomly updated number is futile.
As I have already said measure something tangible or useful, get links for the true value of qualified visitors. IF that link also passes PR and linkpop then it's a win win situation, but chasing links simply for the PR is not going to get you a return by increasing sales. (Unless of course you are selling links on the basis of PR and others are still buying for the same reason)

Well, Many major forums only include signature links for members to see and so search engines don't even know they exist. I have examples of such forums and vice versa.

Yes I am well aware of this and how to find which is crawled and which isn't. So I can ensure that my testing on many things are not skewed by incorrect or invalid assumptions

Here is a useful page to find out if the PR update is underway, it track the PR of a number of websites so you can see how much change their has been:

Page rank watch

Please stop talking about PR again... at least with a SEO guy who is running most successful SEO business in India from over 2.5 years... please...

Erm why? This is a interesting debate, the original post was ‘has the PR update started’, we are deviating from that slightly, but it not like it’s ever going to be much more than. No, No, No, ow yes, my PR has changed. Don’t panic seoindia, you seem to be coming out of this looking quite good. However I don’t think it’s good practice to throw your weight around in a forum by going on about how successful your business is.

Please! What useful data can be gleaned from seeing a change is an inaccurate (-0.9 + 0.5) range of a number that is anything from 1 day to 3 months out of date? If you could see the real PR value in (almost) real time then there may well be something to be gained from watching it, which is exactly why it is not available.

Okay to put this another way, take this hypothetically situation, I have the choice between a link on a page with no PR or a link on a page with a PR of 4. Now given that everything else is pretty much the same, I would go for the page with the link on a page with a PR 4. Because I know the page is well linked to and has a higher chance of getting good traffic and probable has more influence in the search engines.

As I said here:

You agree that inbound links can generate traffic. You agree that inbound links are a perquisite of good ranking. You agree that good ranking would give a site traffic. You look for traffic from the inbound links you acquire. You agree that PR is calculated by inbound links.

If this is the case, PR is a really useful quick indicator of the quality of a link and the traffic it could provide? It is not a flawless indication, but it is quick, better than asking for the site log files.

A good PR on a page also usually means it is a reasonable amount of clicks from the homepage and hence would have a high chance of having passing traffic.

It does have some inaccuracies and it is a total over-simplification but it is still a very good indication.

If PR is a measure of "quality" is this one of the best pages on the internet?

What! That must be one of the best pages on the internet, that is the main download page for Adobe Reader that must be a one of the highest traffic pages on the internet, Pretty much 50% of every internet users must have gone to that page once in their life, apart from maybe a link on google, yahoo or msn homepage that must be one of the best. How could you give that as a bad example? Even a completely unrelated ad would do well purely from the massive amount of passing traffic. I could make a good living off a ad on that page alone.

There is only one useful metric when measuring the effects of link building, and that is "does the link yield a postive ROI (return on investment)". Whether the investment is in time or money (or both), you should be measuring what that link brings you, not looking to a third party figure that is practically a random number.

But the point is when it comes to search engine ranking the link between the Return and Investment are not obvious. Say you get your sales from the highly targeted traffic from your good ranking in the search engines and you know that the good ranking comes from your good inbound links. However you don’t know which inbound links provide you the good ranking and you don’t really know which extra ones to pursue, this is point when you start looking at things like Page Rank.

If you only used the metric "does the link yield a positive ROI (return on investment)" then you would need to acquire the link first then, you would need to be able to accurately measure the return on investment not only from the traffic that comes directly from that link but from what ever improvement you have in the search engines, so you would need to get 1 link at a time (if you got more than 1 you would not be able to determine which results came from which link) wait 3 months to see the change, then you could try out another link. So you would be able to only get accurate data from 4 links a year (and then even that would not be accurate, since your competition is changing and you a would not have a stable yard stick to compare you results to).

I know it's a stupid example but the point is clear.

We are all working with generalisation and everything is in flux, PR is inaccurate but still useful.

but what good would a link from that adobe page be if your site was about (take your sig site for instance) stainless steel fasteners? The people who go to that page are going there to download Acrobat reader and the only thing they are likely to click is the select box for their OS.

Sure you may get traffic from it and 99.99% of that traffic would be time wasters and tyre kickers. 0.01% might be a conversion. So the other 99.99% have taken bandwidth which you may have to pay for and eaten up server resources and you may have earned £10 from the sale.
Though the point I was making in showing a PR 10 page is it is purely the quantity of links NOT the quality. That page ranks no 1 for "click here" BTW. So if you are looking to get visitors who search for "click here" then a link on there would be very good indeed. But other than that pretty useless.

then you would need to acquire the link first then, you would need to be able to accurately measure the return on investment not only from the traffic that comes directly from that link

No, You are still thinking SE rankings alone. What I am saying is; Yes, get the link but look at where the link is from and do not rely on it for SE ranking if it gives a boost, then all well and good, it it doesn't, nothing lost. I do not say don't bother with links just don't get them on the basis of PR.
LInks are like stocks and shares, Their value may go up or they may go down. You cannot and should not rely on their intrinsic value for SE ranking, as has been seen many times over that last couple of years, the forums are full of people crying "Google isn't fair, my rankings have disappeared and I'm about to go bust" apart from minor fluctuations, No site I am or have been working with has lost major portions of visitors during or after updates, even the site i cited earlier did not lose visitors. Sure some rankings dropped off the map but the important stuff did not suffer.
That is where the difference lies, Chasing links purely for ranking and/or PR will always leave the site susceptible to the SE changes and you could wake up one morning to find your source of income has gone.

I have the choice between a link on a page with no PR or a link on a page with a PR of 4. Now given that everything else is pretty much the same

Yep given that scenario that could be right provided that either page was going to send on topic visitors and not forgetting that todays PR4 could be tomorrows PRblank with 0 traffic at a stroke from Google.

Getting links is not always about traffic, sure if you run "made for Adsense" scraper sites, a directory or forum loaded with ads, a banner ad site or any kind of site where you simply want the paid advert clicking on, then random traffic is what you want. But if you sell a product or service you want buyers, tyre kickers waste time. An email to a site operator/owner selling one product doesn't need to get 20 emails a day from people asking "where can I buy [insert almost related product]" because they clicked through from a page about [insert almost related product].
What would you rather have? 100 visitors a day 5 of which bought something and made you a profit of £20 each time or 100,000 vistors a day 10 bought something doubled the profit but then your bandwidth charges cost an extra £1000 a month?

I agree with pretty much everything you have said, I was just trying to get across the point that the Quick tool bar is useful. Exspecaily if you are looking to get ranking. Which a lot of people in the Google forum are.

Conversion (sales/click throughs) are generally what everyone here wants ultimately. Because that the point that everyone gets paid.

Sure you may get traffic from it and 99.99% of that traffic would be time wasters and tyre kickers. 0.01% might be a conversion. So the other 99.99% have taken bandwidth which you may have to pay for and eaten up server resources and you may have earned £10 from the sale.

Yep, that would be a waste of such a fantasic link. I would usually try and get a page with a more general apeal so the conversion would be better. Your right though if each piece of traffic has a certain cost, if the conversion isn't high enough you can be fast losing money and in this example it would just crash the server. But you can see my point it's an amazing link.

But you can see my point it's an amazing link

And if your site was even generally in the same area of business it would be an amazing link regardless of the toolbar display value

This seems to be going on and on, I have never seen fluctuations in PR across datacentres for so long a period.

No fluctuations here.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Serious websites and their owners/operators are NOT waiting with baited breath for another pointless toolbar display update.

Only the ones who haven't learned that it isn't important are!!

Google seems to like introducing changes to algo close to TB PR update *ducks for cover* I know your always protesting that this update has nothing to do with anything and I understand the theory but I do usually see fluctuations in my rankings around the TB update.

I have to definately agree with STOX on this one...PR and spider frequency have the same cause, they are certainly caused by backlinks.

When come the next pr update ?

OK this is the last post i ever make about PR TB update. It changes every 3-4 months. Google doesnt tell us when they update it anf they may feel like changing it at different times. Just continue optimising your site the way you were and forget about the toolbar.

Is PR really important to the site?

as shown on the toolbar? No it isn't

Originally Posted by dannywoon

Is PR really important to the site?

Yes and No. It is important ONLY because so many of us have made it important. It has no value when it comes to the value of your site, the SERP's, etc.

Well it is not a joke but one of my freee site got PR 3 but it is not even indexed in google lol. Isnt it funny

So I believe PR is not at all important. It is only the quality of the website and content that is important.

PR is meant more as a guide for the general public as to the importance of a website. We tend to make the mistake, these days, in believing that Google was brought into being for webmasters.