This article is a bit all over the place. It’s thoughts I have, nothing more, based on my limited experience.

Google Page Rank is just one of 100s of signals / calculations that Google uses to evaluate your site. A high PR does not guarantee high levels of traffic, nor does it lead to good search engine positions.

Example - I have a PR 6 site that gets 20 visitors a day! I have PR 4 sites that get 70 - 100 visitors a day (from Google). The reason? The PR 6 site was a test, without any really decent content, and I haven’t earned any real “trust” in Google’s eyes with this site. One day I will add good content to it, when I have the time, and it is aged a bit (another good signal to Google), but at the moment, the site doesn’t have enough good content to it to make it really “trusted”.

I used to be a PR monger - it’s a throwback to the good all days. A lot of people think PR is dead, some, including myself, don’t. As in the article I linked to says, Matt cutts says PR is good to get you out of Google’s “B” index, the “supplementals”. Sitewide links? Well I whittered on about those in this post about sitewides.

To be clear - PR is useful to get Google spidering your site more in my experience, but again, only useful if you’re continually adding good content to your site. I can make a post and see it at the top of Google in less than a week, which is really helpful to me because I am forever testing Google. So a high PR lets me test Google serps - this is useful to me, so good.

Of course this is conjecture. It could be that through my efforts to increase PR I have improved the trust rank of my site (do you get the dichotomy?) so Google visits it more.

Of course a high pr is also useful too to attract links from people who think your site is trusted (when it might not be) when they look at the little green bar, and sell links from (which i don’t do) to people who think a link on a PR 5 page with 1000 outgoing links is useful.

To increase PR (and escape supplemental hell) is easy. Just get links from pages with high PR. Finding those of course is a problem for most. You can dig for them in Forums or blogs using tools+Google to find them. Note that these links are diluted again, though, and not as good as a link embedded right in the middle of a body of text.

I simply do not accept link exchanges from people who put my page on a links page. They are 99.9% a total waste of time. The only time they are of any use if you have a site that is not in Google, and you want to get it spidered, although I have a theory if Google finds your site through such a link big G thinks:

(”well that’s a crap link, can I expect the site to be of any better quality?”)

- and if Google thinks this, your trust rank is low, for sure. A low trust rank = crap serps - remember this. If you have a highly trusted site with a PR 0 you can still get to the top of Google if you have a few decent links to it from a PR 7 page, for instance.

When asking for a link, try and get links from pages that have in turn a lot of links pointing to that page. You see if you get a link from a page with a 100 links, in a way, all those sites are “sort of” voting for your site (unless they are nofollow links of course). And of course you want a link on a page with as few ourgoing links as possible, because the more links, the more diluted the strength of your link.

Get links from authority sites in your niche to actually rank better. How do you find this? Check Google of course The ones at the top are probably authorative in some way for that keyword.