Great post...it seems like the chicken and egg thing...which came first...I think PR is more an ego thing....content is...in my opinion the better of the two...you are providing a service...which is what is most important...

Been awhile since I posted but I see this thread keeps on going! very cool

My second reason I don't feel PR is all that...
I have seen dark SEO individuals nail pr 9's-10's without any incoming links
My Third reason and then I'll let the hardcore SEO people jump back in.
I have had sites with minimal inbound links and VERY low pr that have ranked within the top 10 results out of millions of other sites...unique content is king IMO.

still within the top 20 after 5 years of being indexed, and it's an outdated page to boot!
healthcare marketing support

Enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend!

why not we let what we know of PR to ourselves for about a year. that'll clear a lot of debates and web spaces dedicated to all this PR BS bashing

you can't keep it on yourself.Every knowledge needs to be share, thats why forums exist. We are exchanging thoughts. . .

in my experiences PR has proved to be significant...as the link above me shows.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Lower PR pages outrank higher PR pages all the time.

This is very true. There are lots of lower PR sites that outranks higher PR sites... Very good point.

PR will always be important as long as some webmasters consider it important.

To all those who say that it's useless, I'd respond by saying that I can make hundreds of dollars by selling links on my PR6 or PR7 site.

As long as I have a market to sell to, it will always be of interest to me.

The title of the thread is completely biased because to some people, PR is the be all end all of their business strategy. And yes, those strategies can be very profitable.

Only while there are mugs around to buy them, and only until Google gets around to negating the toolbar PR for the sites that you are selling them from.

Yes, but such is the obsession with PR that I need not reveal the site in public to attract people willing to buy links on them. Google will never be able to clamp down completely. And the mugs that you talk of will continue to fuel the fire by continuing to purchase links and make business decisions using the measuring unit of PR.

I don't like to call these people mugs. If PR is relevant to their strategy, and time isn't on their side, buying links is a logical business move to them.

We can't pretend that PR is going to become meaningless overnight. SEO is such a sprawling subject, people can only learn through trial and error. There will always be enough beginners, and enough experts making money from the beginners, to ensure that the cycle continues to prove profitable. And what's wrong with that?

I think a lot of people across these boards make their decisions using webmaster logic rather than money making logic. And there's a massive difference there.

Sometimes you have to be eyes open to what the market is doing, rather than what the market SHOULD be doing. Otherwise we're all striving towards ideals. And I don't focus on ideals because they don't make me money.

i use the PR toolbar, there are lots of conflicting ideas here, but do we have a concrete bible to follow?

sorry. found myself responding to old post by accident

Originally Posted by tehfincheh

Yes, but such is the obsession with PR that I need not reveal the site in public to attract people willing to buy links on them. Google will never be able to clamp down completely. And the mugs that you talk of will continue to fuel the fire by continuing to purchase links and make business decisions using the measuring unit of PR.

I don't like to call these people mugs. If PR is relevant to their strategy, and time isn't on their side, buying links is a logical business move to them.

We can't pretend that PR is going to become meaningless overnight. SEO is such a sprawling subject, people can only learn through trial and error. There will always be enough beginners, and enough experts making money from the beginners, to ensure that the cycle continues to prove profitable. And what's wrong with that?

I think a lot of people across these boards make their decisions using webmaster logic rather than money making logic. And there's a massive difference there.

Sometimes you have to be eyes open to what the market is doing, rather than what the market SHOULD be doing. Otherwise we're all striving towards ideals. And I don't focus on ideals because they don't make me money.

How do you get around the fact that toolbar PR is the SEO equivalent to a placebo? Even though people might be willing to buy the so-called high PR links, it doesn't replace the fact that those links are essentially useless. The fact that they have a high toolbar PR doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to help others rank well. Even though you can make money selling those links, it doesn't have anything to do with business or webmaster logic, but rather ethics. There might be a market for it, but it's a fundamentally unethical one.

Using the same logic you espouse, it's perfectly justifiable to sell people land on the moon if they don't know any better. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

If you want to look at it from a purely business perspective, fine, let's do that as well. By selling people something inherently useless, you are undermining any future relationship with them. Sure, you might get their money now, but what about tomorrow? Sooner or later they're going to catch on and then they'll drop you and tell everyone they know how you ripped them off. On the other hand, by giving them actual value, say by helping them with on-site SEO and converting more of their visitors to customers or an off-site marketing campaign with SEO elements, you'll give them something that will actually benefit them and they will be far more likely to be a return customer. Loyal customers will return again and again and will be willing to pay a premium for your services because they know the value they'll be getting.

PT Barnum talked about another sucker being born every minute, but if you ignore the long-term consequences of unethical business practices, your clients aren't the only ones who deserve such a label. Instant gratification isn't always worth it.

Using the same logic you espouse, it's perfectly justifiable to sell people land on the moon if they don't know any better. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Well, you say that, but people are already selling "land on the moon"! Yes, just because they can...they do.

Of course, the land that they're buying has absolutely no value other than a few coordinates in the company's private database. But the fact is that people do still buy it because its value is relational to them. That's what I'm saying here.

PR may mean nothing to you, your friends or your neighbours dog. But if somebody out there wants PR backlinks, who am I to care what reason they want them for?

I don't post advertisements saying "improve your search engine performance by purchasing a link on one of our PR7 sites!!! 100% top-rankings success guaranteed!!!"

It's basic supply and demand stuff.

In the same way that MoonEstates.com doesn't promise I can go and build a brand new conservatory on my recently purchased moon strip, a PR7 link doesn't promise me I can seal off the first page of Google's rankings with my online real estate.

By selling people something inherently useless, you are undermining any future relationship with them. Sure, you might get their money now, but what about tomorrow?

It only becomes useless if they one day wake up and think to themselves, "You know what? I can't be dealing with this PR craze anymore. I'm done. I'm out." And once they've realized that they don't care for PR links anymore, it's highly unlikely that I'm going to make a returning customer out of them!

I go back to my original point.

Sooner or later they're going to catch on and then they'll drop you and tell everyone they know how you ripped them off.

How on earth is that going to happen?

I ripped them off? They ripped themselves off when they decided to purchase a PR7 link without thinking twice about whether it was actually any use to them.

The only way I could have possibly ripped them off is by saying "PR7 link for sale" when the link was actually PR5 or whatever. That's the only way. I made no promises so as long as their link remains on my PR7 site, my obligations are fulfilled. Let them live and learn as they see fit, it's of no interest to me.

But , PR is the main thing a visitor will be noticing in our site and if our site has low PR it is defaultedly assumed that the site is worthless or near useless. It has become a benchmark icon in www.

Utterly, Utterly wrong!

The vast majority of REAL people out there, that's the ones with credit cards who buy things from websites don't have the Google toolbar installed and the ones that do probably haven't bothered to look at the things that are switched of by default (the PR display being one of those).
If your hypothesis was in anyway factual Ebay would never sell a single item because most ebay pages don't exist long enough to even get a real PR value never mind the several months before the toolbar is updated.
Amazon would not make sales because the majority of their pages never ever get a toolbar PR value.

Don't imagine for one microsecond that just because YOU think the toolbar green bar is somehow vital to the success of your site, everybody in the world sees it and cares about it because it simply ISN'T the case.

agreed!

Majority of the people has no idea about PR maybe link seller or link buyer,...Many of my customer is using IE.

PR don't matter that much though many are getting crazy about it due to they wanna see that green bar for their site..somehow this motivates to do hard work..lol but as long as you got a good positioning and conversation you will not pay attention to it anyway that much...

PR matters to does who sell links . . . I'm I right?

Pr is more than an ego--- i agree . Most webmasters preferred to exchange links to sites with high pr to get link juice

good artical, it bugs me on how much people value PR, relevant traffic is what you want!!