I have read so much about Page Rank, even saw that the Advertising forum section have links selling according to their Page Rank. For normal web hosting company like mine 8.to, how would Page Rank help me?

Correct me if I am wrong I would assume page rank helps only for those who are accepting advertisements? Is that it? Then why the huge hoohaa over it everytime the pagerank was updated? Really beats me.

Search engines like google rank you higher, so you will get more search engine traffic the higher you are ranked. So it can help to get people to your site. For advertisers it's mostly just to show that your site is popular.

Actually PR can mean a lot or it can mean little.

You can buy PR from brokers who sell inbound links to your site which will inflate the actual "importance" of your site to Google provided you do it long enough. This can give your site a PR of 5 or 6 but you have to spend a lot to do it.

BUT, you won't really accomplish much from this method simply by having a good PR because it wouldn't really lead to much in the way of visitors.

UNLESS, over time the inbound links caused you to pop in the search engines for competitive keywords which would lead to traffic and revenue.

PR is a measure of how "important" you are according to Google based on the number and quality of inbound links. Google doesn't count all inbound links and high PR page links help out more. The natural idea of it is that if your page is useful to a lot of people then they will link to you on their own pages. The more people link to you, the more "buzz" there is surrounding your site. Based on the types of sites that are linking to you, Google combines your site and page themes with the themes of the pages linking to you to determine how you will rank for given keywords. It's all very complicated and hard to explain.

So does PR matter - yes and no. No it doesn't matter if it means nothing to the traffic you get. Yes it does if it means you are high in the search engines because Google and the other SE's see that lots of folks are linking to you.

Right,

Just to add, to measure the page’s importance Google consider all other factors such as the title tag and keywords are taken into account. Google uses PR to adjust results as a resultant the sites which are more important will move up in the result page of a users search, accordingly it further looks at which pages link to each other to determine its importance.

a good Pagerank usually means you have an 'authority' domain name. An authority domain name is usually a powerful domain name in Google's eyes which will usually rank quite well if optimized accordingly for your targeted keyword phrases.

Of course you will have people that will manipulate the Pagerank score and value, so Pagerank isn't the be all and end all.

There is of course a range of other contributing factors that will decide your positioning, Pagerank is only 1 of them.

In a competitive market like web hosting, travel & real estate, I would say generally a good Pagerank is a must if you wish to compete in the search engine result pages.

If I am not wrong, I think it indicates the amount of quality links that are directed to your web site?

Originally posted by DevilDog
...You can buy PR from brokers...
Which is why PR is useless as an indicator of how popular your site is...

Originally posted by EagleImagery
Which is why PR is useless as an indicator of how popular your site is...

:confused:

Useless? So the fact that webhostingtalk.com has a PR of 8 is a useless indicator?

I mentioned that it is possible to buy text links but that hardly means that everybody does. PR is certainly not the end all to site success but it does help. After all, if you followed my string above, if a site has high PR it means Google thinks it is important - ergo, that site will have better natural Search Engine results for certain keywords than those with lower PR about the same subject - ergo, more search engine traffic - ergo, PR is not "completely useless".

I got a pagerank of 6 but can't seem to rank well at all in search engines, weird, what is the norm for a high rank in search engines? Pagerank of 8 seems only for sites like WHT, don't think ordinary hosting companies can achieve that.

A ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page.
search engine normally watch what results someone selects for a particular search, thereafter it may drop a high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks, possibly this may result a lower ranking.

I think it's useless in some respects. Although obtaining a PR can be done through hard work or alot of money!

PR will help your website in the rankings of google (higher PR, the higher its importance, in their eyes) and also increase it's value to the consumer :)

Looks like you're mistaken cause for effect :)

PR is usually a result of your web site being relevant to its niche. In other words if you claim that your web site is about donuts and you actually have information about coffee on your web site - you'll achieve a small PR, if you put a lot of donuts instead - you're golden (well, almost).

In addition, google's PR has nothing to do with other search engines' (read: yahoo, msn) relevance because algorythms are way different.

Probably google has tweaked its algorithm again. The result of the algorithm has been modified to fit different topological web graph structures.