It’s Rank Up Time Suckaz!!!!

That’s right.  PR updates are coming out.  All but one of my sites saw a bump up, including one PR5.  I know, I know.  There are already hands going up in the class.

“But Mr. Korr, isn’t PR useless?  Why the hell should we care about getting bumped?  Oh, and is it ok if my balls are hanging lower than they were last week?”

I’ll answer the questions in order.  No PR is not useless.  Does it help you rank?  Yes and No.  The PR of your site is more or less a measure of authority.  You will, in fact, see many sites outrank other sites of higher PR.  I have seen one such phrase where both sites targetted the same Keyword.  One a PR4, another a PR1.  The PR1 won the fight.  Yay me!

So in that regard, PR does nothing for you.  However, if you have a higher rank, you can pretty much guarantee that G trusts your site a little more than it did before, and may even crawl you more often.  Dirty bugger.  This helps two fold.  The added trust helps your inner links carry more weight.  So new links found on your pages will be given more initial weight.  Also, the faster crawls mean you rank before other people giving your link age a few microseconds of a head start.

But the real benefit to me for PR is not in the inner linking or crawl rate.  No, it is in link BUILDING.  Think about it.  If someone asks to trade links with you, what is one of the first things you ask?  “What is the rank of the domain?”

The higher the PR, the more trusted the site is in the eyes of a would be trader.  If you were offered a PR1 or a PR3 link in the same niche, and could only choose one….which would it be?

Does the PR really matter?  Slightly, but relevance is more important.  If you had an email marketing site and the PR1 was the #2 position for your primary keyword while the PR3 was an adsense farming site, suddenly the PR1 has more weight in your eyes.  Yet the typical gut response is to go with the higher PR.

Take my PR5 site.  Does it get more traffic?  Hell no.  But guess what.  I now have a pile of PR4s chomping at the bit to trade links.  It now opens the door to PR6 trades.  And more.  We are now positioned much better for taking on competitive terms because we can offer link exchanges and deals with more authoritative sites.

So what if the gurus claim PR doesn’t affect SERPs.  For the most part they are right, but this game is all about using your brain and thinking outside the box.  I don’t give two shits about getting my PR up.  But if it helps me get better links and therefore higher SERPs, you bet i’ll put some effort into it.

In the end, whether or not PR ranking helps with SERPs is irrelevant.  What matters is most people think it does and will trade you links happily for a quality PR link.

One final example.  A PR4 site of mine was on page 3 for the primary term.  A bunch of no PR sites were above me.  They HAPPILY traded me links to get my precious PR.  They went no where.  I moved to the top.  Make sense?

Oh, and if your balls dropped it’s about damn time.  Now go start making money.

–Korr