Although I am not a proponent of PageRank as one of the more important ranking factors in SEO, high page rank values are still a common factor across authoritative sites.
Achieving a ‘decent’ PageRank is still part of most SEO campaigns for newly launched websites. ‘Decent’ in my opinion could be termed as a PageRank of 3 and above. I have to say I’ve seen websites with PRs of 1-3 rank No.1 for highly competitive key phrases.
So if you are a PageRank junkie or just an SEO whose client requires a decent PR as a key performance indicator (KPI) for their project, here is a nice PageRank Calculator table that guides you on approximately how many links you would need to acquire to get your desired PageRank
| PR | Links for PR3 | Links for PR4 | Links for PR5 | Links for PR6 | Links for PR7 | Links for PR 8 |
| PR 1 | 555 | 3,055 | 16,803 | 92,414 | 508,277 | 2,795,522 |
| PR 2 | 101 | 555 | 3,055 | 16,803 | 92,414 | 508,277 |
| PR 3 | 18.5 | 101 | 555 | 3,055 | 16,803 | 92,414 |
| PR 4 | 3.5 | 18.5 | 101 | 555 | 3,055 | 16,803 |
| PR 5 | 1 | 3.5 | 18.5 | 101 | 555 | 3,055 |
| PR 6 | 0.5 | 1 | 3.5 | 18.5 | 101 | 555 |
| PR 7 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 1 | 3.5 | 18.5 | 101 |
| PR 8 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 1 | 3.5 | 18.5 |
| PR 9 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 1 | 3.5 |
| PR 10 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 1 |
So to get a PR5 for a newly setup website, you would need only 1 PR7 link or 101 PR4 links. And to get a site up to PR6, you would need 19 PR6 links or 4 PR7 links or a massive 555 PR4 links.
The moral of the story here is if you are into getting a high PR for your site, you are probably better off spending your time acquiring fewer higher PR links than trying to acquire hundreds and in some cases thousands of low PR links – imagine, you would need about 3,055 PR4 links for get a PR7 and only 4 PR8 links to get your website to a PageRank of 7. Some sites get the best of both worlds i.e. massive amounts of low PR links and high PR links via link baiting.
A Point of Warning!
The above calculations are based on the assumption that the webpage in each scenario has only one to three outbound links (which in reality is hard to come by). As an example, the value of link from a PR7 webpage with 50 outbound links on it already is sure to pass a PR6 or less to the sites it links to but a PR7 webpage with a single link on it would pass the full PR7 value to that single link. If you have a reasonable understanding of calculus, you can read the original Google paper – The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and this Wikipedia article on PageRank.
Fuzz One's Head of Search Marketing, he has been involved in the search marketing industry since 2004. He is a Certified Google AdWords Expert, an SEO expert and is highly proficient in website analytics
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Kunle T Campbell
andy12/08/09 @ 12:12 am
guys can u help to promote my web site
Michael Knorr12/28/09 @ 08:12 pm
I found this quite helpful to understand pagerank as an individual who is toying with Seo. Thanks. 12/28/09
Thomas Bowen02/21/10 @ 06:02 pm
K.C. – thanks – your take on PR analysis and the relative difficulty of blanket linking to the lower echelons is the first I’ve seen with valid linkcount comparisons. Good job!
Jon Randall04/23/10 @ 06:04 pm
This was good. There are some interesting points made on Wikipedia on how pagerank is calculated as well. I really do like your post here though. It is very helpful.
James12/07/10 @ 07:12 pm
Hi Kunle,
Very useful tabke thanks – like you say an obsession with PR doesn’t necessarily leead to high SERPS results but the linking structure and the proportionate value of links are good to keep in mind throughout any link building campaign.
J.
Diego - Blogspc11/27/11 @ 08:11 pm
A good and useful article. Good analysis of the Google Page Rank
eltito01/01/12 @ 05:01 pm
Nice table, but how many PR0 sites are needed to get a PR. Not all Pages got a PR form the beginning, so some sites must have started.