It's true, we all know ToolBar *****Rank is useless. It was invented to let people compare web sites without looking at them. Sort of a pro ignorance tool. At least in that it gives webmasters a false sense of knowing the "value" of a web site and not having to look deeper. And yet it's still the most important thing in the world to too many people. Some yahoo even said PR is more important than traffic!

Since I've been playing on Digital Pointless I keep seeing people say if you want a PR 2 you need to buy links from PR 4 pages. If you want PR 5 you need to buy from PR 7 pages. Even in the face of Google's announcements. They also say the best ways to gain "link popularity" are forum posting, spamming "dofollow" blogs, articles, and a waning interest in directories.

I'll admit PR 2 isn't the high man on the totem pole. But I got it with zero directory submittals, zero article submittions, and I think it's only one blog that turned nofollow off that I comment on, but that's only because it's interesting and funny. Probably the links in my sig are the closest thing to SEO, and that's a stretch. People read my posts which are usually long and rambling, and when they like what I have to say they check out my blog. And then a few of them link to it.

Really I put no effort into SEO, and got what some people see as a slightly valuable commodity (PR 2) just from people liking my content. This site added me to its blogroll after I linked to one of their posts and gave a mixed review. Others have noticed the blog by other means, a few of them from this place. Half of this was an experiment to see if it's possible for a site to do ok without SEO, and half out of laziness. I don't have time to "link build", it takes long enough finding bizarre news and coming up with bizarre opinions.

My advice to others from this experiment is a new variation of the 80 20 rule. Put 80 % of your time and effort into your own site and 20 % into getting people to see it. Not only does it work, but it's less work at the end of the day. And I proved it still brings results, at least usless metric that means nothing kind of results.

Well said, but there are still many people who will praise Google’s PR. But it will take a long time for people to realise the PR isn't everything.

On one website I have designed for my uncle, I have done hardly any SEO work and it still brings in a steady stream of traffic. And guess what? PR of 0, but yet according to some people that is not good enough, and for a website to be successful it needs a high PR.

Originally Posted by hamesy

Well said, but there are still many people who will praise Google’s PR. But it will take a long time for people to realise the PR isn't everything.

I agree with this. there are lots of people who get obsessed with PR. once they gain some of this, most of them only focuses on how to improve it instead of the quality of the site itself which IMO is more important.

And even if PR is what you're most interested in, it's been my recent experience that improving your site slowly improves your PR. But it also improves more important measurables, like how much time people spend on a page, if they leave comments or not, and if you have a product, if they but.

Newbie, I am speechless. Very well said



fastreplies

Depends on the datacenter, John. It's still showing up as 0 here (I had to enable PageRank on my toolbar just to see that, too. :P )

Funny thing is I don't even have a copy of the Google Toolbar. I only checked some of those web sites that do it for you. Well, some meaning one.

And at the end of the day I don't care what my PR is even as much as I care my average number of words per post. But since so many people think PR is the holy grail of SEO, I wanted to point out you can still get PR even without spending the bulk of your time "link building".

But TBPR isn't something that people should measure their site against.

You actually have an average number of words per post? Now that's obsessive in a cool sort of way.

Isn't it crazy how easy it is to get "PR" I don't think people even have to try.

I had a similar experience to yours. Last January I started the Garden Hacker blog I have in the sig here as a supplemental blog to my main blog to keep the entries shorter on my main blog shorter. Aside from the sig here I link to it from my main blog because I'll split up a topic and the GH blog is sort of my "read more" section, I submitted once to netscape before it became propeller and linked to it from one other social site, it is in one directory that had no PR and has 28 posts. On technorati there are "43 blog reactions" mostly links from my main blog. The cluster map shows 3,687 visits since March 1st and on a good day it has 10 visitors.

During the previous PR update it went from a 0 to a 3.

I had the same experience with another blog I put up, again to keep my main blog neater, where I do reviews of stuff I like in my field. Since January 5th it has 19 entries, links from my main blog, no forum sigs, on technorati it has 20 blog reaction (again mostly from my main blog) and on a good day about 5 visitors. At the same update that my GH blog went from a 0-3 in the tool bar that blog also went from a 0-3.

Now since those two haven't gotten much content added to them or links I'm thinking they're going to drop to 0 in this update. But I don't understand why people go through so much trouble and come up with wacky schemes to get PR. From my experience all you have to do is start one and write.

Congratulations!

I haven't been to your blog for a while, I'm looking around. The world map quiz is right up my alley. Very eclectic mix of stuff. I'm sure there's something in there that quite a few people took interest in at some point.