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

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.

How to Calculate Your PageRank is a post from: Fuzz One Media

Another PageRank toolbar update is in progress at the moment. I think it would take a few more days to fully update across the web. Although web page / website PageRank updates are not as important as actually ranking for your key phrases of choice, it is still a well accepted parameter of a good website in the webmaster community.

Some site’s of mine & my clients have had their PR increased, some other websites’ PR have remained static and others have actually dropped. I have however doublechecked their organic search referral traffic and their Google rankings; they all appear to be normal. It’s yet more proof that PR does not have a huge impact on traffic and rankings.

Lets just sit tight and wait for the update to propagate.

Photo credits: DannySullivan via Flickr

Page Rank Update – October 30th 2009 is a post from: Fuzz One Media

Just wanted to let you know that the Google Toolbar PageRank update for 2009 is currently in progress. Although at the time of writing this post, it is yet to be confirmed by Google, folks out on twitter started reporting updates from May 26th.  Some of our clients’ sites have been updated with PageRank increases

Second Google PageRank Update in 2009 – May 27, 2009 is a post from: Fuzz One Media

Did anyone notice the Google Toolbar PageRank update on New Year’s eve? The head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts confirmed it on twitter and on his blog. Most of our sites and clients sites have gotten updated…for the better with improvements

PageRank Update is a post from: Fuzz One Media