Yep. It’s here again. While many webmasters watch it closely, I don’t really give a rat’s darn about the PR system anymore. What matters is SERPs- or search engine ranking position for critical search terms. After all, people find you through SERP, not PR.

Anyway, for those avid about PR, Hobo web gives some compelling insights that may help boost PR ranking for the next update which should mosey over by April.

Google Page Rank FAQs

The fast way to lose PR is to openly sell links on your website. This is now officially against Google Webmaster Guidelines for inclusion.

At the moment, the only tangible effect when Google penalizes a site, is a reduction of visible Toolbar PR.

Many sites that openly manipulated Google SERPS via paid revue blogging and link-selling had their Google PR dramatically reduced in the last quarter of 2007 in Google’s opening salvo in the “war on paid links‘, or so Google would have us believe.

Toolbar PR has little or no effect on amount of visitors Google will send you - believe me. Perhaps this is why bloggers who had PR devalued reported no loss of visitors from Google.

Many believe Google can’t find all paid links, and are using the Google Toolbar to spread FUD,

If you install the Google Toolbar you will see a green indicator in your Internet Explorer / Firefox toolbar showing you the Google Page Rank of the page. Hovering over the green bar will give you a number which is the page’s Google Page Rank.

It’s accepted that the Green Toolbar Version of Page Rank is more than a few months out of date.

Google Toolbar / DC PR is not an accurate representation of your current Real Page Rank and now that Google openly manipulates what you see, the integrity of the toolbar PR is very questionable indeed.

Think of Google Toolbar PR as ‘an indication of the PR of what your site might have been last month’.

To get a higher Page Rank for your domain, you need to get a lot of other pages with PR to link to you. I used an analogy to visualize Google PR, and used this same Google Heat analogy to get a PR 7 site until PR was apparently reduced within the SEO community, and this site fell to PR 5.

Page Rank flows, and so can be manipulated, channeled, blocked (with NoFollow) and screwed up. My Google Heat article explains how you can channel PR around a site. Just substitute “Heat” for “PR”.

Remember sites don’t have Google Page Rank, pages do. That’s why it’s possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than the home page. The way a page gets Google Page Rank is from links to it and that’s the only way of improving Google Page Rank. IBLs (incoming backlinks) from high Google Page Rank pages can give you more Google Page Rank “Juice” than links from low Google Page Rank pages. There is one other factor at play.

The Google Page Rank they “give” is spread over the number of outgoing links on the pages. You may get more Google Page Rank benefit from a Google Page Rank 3 page with only two outbound links than a Google Page Rank 7 page with hundreds of outbound links.

Google looks to be rolling out PR changes month to month recently. One thing you can be sure off: When Google revises Google Page Rank the fastest way to discover it is at Digital Point.

I’ve seen sites go from anywhere from PR 0 to PR 7 in one update.

One still useful aspect of PR is that when an update happens you can use Toolbar PR to monitor how effectively you have spread potential Google Juice or Google Heat through a site architecture.