Awe how sad, the PR of the blog dropped to 3. BooHoo. I have been looking at my other sites and the change is mostly negative. It does seem that the importance of PR is dropping, and I find myself looking at it less and less. Of course the only time I look at it is when I am looking for advertising opportunities for my clients, as I don’t do any advertising for my own company other than word of mouth.

How has the PR Update affected you, and do you care, did you even notice?

So it seems the first PR Update for 2008 is underway. The PR for Pixelheadonline is back from a PR 3 to 4 again. It had been brought down to 3 in the last update, which could not have been even 3 months ago.
I was informed there was an update by SEOSOS. So I went and checked and so it seems there indeed has been an update.
How is everyone making out in this update?

Google must have done a PR update. I notice that our directories including Pixelheadonline.com now have Page Rank. Then I went onto the blog which had been PR4, and it was gone. Then I came back to it, and it was back at 4. No idea what is going on. Perhaps I should do myself a favor and not worry about the PR of my sites.

What exactly is PR and Should I care?

From what I gather, Google PR is determined by the number of other sites that link to your site. The more PR rank the more sites that link to your site. If sites with high PR(5 or above) link to your site, this is another way of getting your sites PR up. So if a site owner with a high PR likes what my blog has to say, and links to it, my PR should go up.

Legit PR?

So I have a site and I want to get the PR up so that it makes me look as if I am an authority site in my field. So I go out and buy links from various text link add sites for a very hefty monthly budget. As a result of having deep pockets, my PR does go up. But is it right? Who am I kidding? Does it create authority?
I often times go on directories that have PR5 home pages, but have no rank in the interior pages, and even worse yet, have very few cached interior pages. I think it is kind of funny that these so called high PR directories ask for paid submissions to pages that are not even cached. Opps, I digress from the post purpose.
Is it wrong or is it right? It seems that buying links on pages with high PR is one of the main reasons that Google’s page rank is no longer as important as it was in the past.

What is Better Than Home page PR?

Rather than focusing on Home page PR when I am looking at a site to decide if I want to trust the site, I tend to look at other things rather than just the PR of the home page.

• Does the site have any internal page PR?
• How many cached pages does the site have?
• Does the site have a Privacy Policy(especially ecommerce sites)
• What Credentials or certifications does the site have if I trusting the information on the site.
• Does the site have or allow Customer feedback?
• Does the site have original content or is it just a Google Adsense template site(hate them with a passion)?
• Contact Info- How frustrating is it to go on a site, and there is no contact info to let the owners know that they have broken links or to request advertising options?
• Web 2.0 features- Does the site have the ability to develop a community of users?

Page Rank Update Conclusion

To wrap up this post before I loose my focus again, I vow that I will try to ignore or devalue Google PR. Sure I will allow myself to enjoy the pat on the back I get from Google when I get an increase in my page rank, but I will not create, or network for the sole intent of increasing my page rank. So when I get a PR 5 site, I will be happy, but I will not look at it as if I have achieved a goal. Rather, the goal to create a content rich trusted site, hopefully, will have been met.
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