I'm no SEO expert and i'm trying to figure out why the forum in my signature is only PR2.

This isn't a huge project by any means so I don't need any type of top notch optimization, just a general idea of what i'm doing wrong. I should be able to get this thing up to at least PR5..

Any ideas?

Raising PR is usually getting backlinks, have you had your forum included in some web directories etc?

seo it is mean search engine optmization it is related with your site submittion and page rank

You need more backlinks with better PR.

back links preferably not from directories but from text based pages to get higher page ranks

I'm no SEO expert and i'm trying to figure out why the forum in my signature is only PR2. I see a PR4 for the home page right now, not a PR2. There does seem to be some PageRank update activity happening over the past day or two, so that may reflect your current status.

One thing to keep in mind in looking at PageRank is that the PR value that Google uses internally as part of the ranking process is updated continually as new pages and links are indexed, but visible PageRank, the extracted value that is available through the toolbar and the various "PageRank checker" tools is a snapshot that is updated only every few months. Any linkbuilding work that you do after a particular "PageRank update" (which really is just a refreshing of the visible PR scores) won't be reflected in visible PageRank until the next such update -- even though it will affect rankings during that interim period.

So, why "only" a PR4? The average page will be scored as between a 4 and a 5, which will display as 4. The types of links you get are what determines it... and with a look at just a few of the listed backlinks for this site I didn't see any from pages that themselves show a PageRank of over 4 (as I said, I didn't look at them all). Most are directory pages with a number of outgoing links; the PageRank contribution of a given page is divided among all of the page's outgoing links. Also, Google is making a clear effort to algorithmically identify and devalue paid links -- even anyone who is not paying for links has to be aware that certain links may appear similar enough to paid links that they'll be hit. I wouldn't think that any of the links I looked at for this site would fit that definition; that's just intended as general linkbuilding advice for the current climate. :)

PR is highly overrated... even google thinks the energy spent on this conceived idea of PR SEO is quite wacky. The only thing you really need to understand about PR is that there is nothing you can do code-wise to increase your PR, but rather the only thing you can do code-wise is prevent the PR you have from leaking. In other words, many sites suffer from PR leaks which basically means you have too many pages than is absolutely necessary. Firming up things such as Print-thread views, view post pages, and multipage threading can do wonders.

Oh man. While I skipped doing so in this thread so as to just answer a simple question, I've often written that focusing on PageRank is a Bad Idea that distracts people from the potential ranking elements that they should be paying attention to. But if there's anything that people should worry less about than PageRank in general, it's "PR leakage."

And please, anyone reading this thread, don't take the above "PR leaks which basically means you have too many pages than is absolutely necessary" as meaning that you should limit how many pages your site should have, or that a site can have "too many pages" to rank well.

Oh man. While I skipped doing so in this thread so as to just answer a simple question, I've often written that focusing on PageRank is a Bad Idea that distracts people from the potential ranking elements that they should be paying attention to. But if there's anything that people should worry less about than PageRank in general, it's "PR leakage."

And please, anyone reading this thread, don't take the above "PR leaks which basically means you have too many pages than is absolutely necessary" as meaning that you should limit how many pages your site should have, or that a site can have "too many pages" to rank well.
PR leakage would occur if you had too many outbound links or just too many pages in general? Sorry if thats a bad question Ive just never heard the term before

PR leakage would occur if you had too many outbound links or just too many pages in general? Sorry if thats a bad question Ive just never heard the term beforePR leakage is related to outgoing links. Since the PageRank of each of your own pages contributes to that of each page you link to, you'd maximize PageRank by having no outgoing links -- all of the contributed PR from your own pages would go to your other pages. However, doing so would mean losing the benefit outgoing links may bring you in other ranking elements. Since the overall benefit of any related PR change itself would be minimal, it'd almost certainly be a bad idea.

Outgoing links, as well, from any of your pages to other internal pages that can not be passed PageRank would conribute to "leakage." For example, pages that don't exist, or that cannot be spidered due to robots.txt or a robots meta tag.

Since Google made the decision (what I feel was simply a marketing decision) to highlight PageRank by making it the only ranking element that they display publicly, it tends to get much more attention than it deserves. Look at PageRank increases as one measure of your linkbuilding success, but to make increasing it your priority usually is self-defeating if your ultimate goal is improved rankings.

Classic Example of Forums PR Leakage:

Compare http://www.webhostingtalk.com to http://forums.seochat.com

Take a look at all the vBulletin features and code that have been stripped from the HTML. For more on vB leakage... www.vbseo.com . Their are plenty a threads / article on this subject.

To be a little more concrete as to why forums.seochat.com has much better PR retainage, as opposed to WHT.. the answer does not necessarily lie in the number of incoming links, but rather a tightening of things such as the archive. Even if you only allow the archive (exclude showthread in robots)... you are still providing too many pages than are necessary. You won't get hit with dupe content penalties, but you will get hit with PR leakage and here is why...

If you serve up to your visitors two versions of each thread (notice I said visitors not search bots)... they have the ability to link to either on other sites. But what usually happens is people block everything but the archive from the spiders, so the PR goes to the archive page. Nothing wrong with this, but if someone wants to link to a thread from another site, they certainly are not going to link to that archive thread... they are going to link to the showthread.php (which is excluded in robots). Hence... you have a leak of PR because you should be getting PR boost to only one thread page, not TWO!! Your archived thread will never see inbound links. That's why I favor a sitemap instead of the archive. The point is to consolidate your content and inbound links. Don't lose power by having people link to a page the spiders can't see. Hope this makes sense! :)

The question is - I've seen my page rank go up but no change in my listings on Google (i.e. none :)) - so does it really affect it?

I have another site with no page rank + great rankings on Google yet just as competitive a keyword.

Well obviously there is a correlation between SERPs and page rank... however trying to assimilate the two to understand one for the other is futile. If you want my suggestion... forget completely about this thing called "page rank" as it concerns to your site. Only give thought to this concept when analyzing other people's websites. I think that's the best advice anyone can give about PageRank.

If you want my suggestion... forget completely about this thing called "page rank" as it concerns to your site. Only give thought to this concept when analyzing other people's websites. I think that's the best advice anyone can give about PageRank.I'd go a step further, and say just forget about it except as a curiosity. It's a toy! :)

PageRank is a measurement of links, but it's not only just one of many elements involved in ranking, it's also just one of many elements involving links. Focusing on PageRank -- to which generally speaking any link contributes -- distracts you from where your linkbuilding campaign should be targeted. For example, links that are in line with your site's theme will help in ranking more than those that are not, but in PageRank terms that makes no difference. An increase in PageRank that comes from just any link (which you don't care about if your goal is to increase PR) won't help you overall as much as will getting a number of targeted links that happen to increase PageRank by the same amount.

Focusing on PageRank means giving no attention to which sites might be authorities, which might be hubs, and which of those will help you more. Focusing on PageRank distracts from considering which linking sites may be identified by a search engine as spam link sources. Focusing on PageRank means giving less priority than is due to anchor text and surrounding body text on linking pages. And on and on. If you work on the important elements of linkbuilding, your PageRank will go up incidentally. If you work on "building PageRank," you may happen incidentally to do well on some of those other factors -- or you may in the end make your inbound link situation worse than it was before.

Anyway, back to the original post: looking back up there I see that I looked at the wrong site when I thought I saw a PR4; it is in fact a PR2. And the reason for that is clear: it's simply a lack of a sufficient number of significant inbound links.

Even ignoring PageRank, that's not a good thing. Links benefit in many ways that are more important than PageRank, and the site won't rank well for most worthwhile queries until the inbound links are strengthened. Work on that task -- don't work on "building PageRank."

I'd go a step further, and say just forget about it except as a curiosity. It's a toy! :)

My turn to quote :) I really think there is some usefulness to PR and its analysis in the SEO realm. I don't think it should be taken lightly like a "toy", because your PR has a direct effect (or at least it is surmised) on the frequency of indexing (or visits perhaps) by the spiders of your site. Like I said earlier... it is obvious that there is INDEED A CORRELATION between SERPs and PR. This does not mean a PR5 will outrank a PR4... but somewhere along the lines google felt it necessary to give you a PR score lower or higher than someone else. Why, we don't know.. but it's not a mere assumption, guess or bogus score all together.

My whole point on this subject is... PR is like water. Google determines how big your drinking glass is (aka your website) and fills up your glass with water (PR). The more water, the more PR. Building pagerank is useless because your drinking glass can only hold so much water.. in fact it holds exactly the amount of PR google gave you. BUT, most sites have tiny holes in their drinking glass and that PR google gives you is draining (leaking) out of certain areas... and google doesn't like refills.

Like I said earlier... it is obvious that there is INDEED A CORRELATION between SERPs and PR. This does not mean a PR5 will outrank a PR4... but somewhere along the lines google felt it necessary to give you a PR score lower or higher than someone else. Why, we don't know.. but it's not a mere assumption, guess or bogus score all together.
But in fact we do know. The PageRank algorithm's details are public, have been heavily analyzed and critiqued, and are the foundation on which a number of later techniques have been based (TrustRank, spam mass, etc.). What's not known about the actual current implementation of PageRank by Google comes down to arcane details: what damping factor is being used, what subset of sites or pages have PR-passing ability filtered for spamming, and least important of all -- because it has no affect at all on ranking -- how the real probability vector value that is used in ranking is extrapolated into the zero to 10 number that shows on the toolbar.

The fact that Google made the marketing decision to put that extrapolated number on the toolbar has ever since created the line of thinking that it must be important or they wouldn't be showing it to us. In fact the more logical line of thinking should be that if it were really important they would hide it from us!

If you read the original PageRank documentation, you find a conclusion that today seems almost naive: that PageRank alone would be sufficient to rank web pages. If that were ever true it ceased to be true as soon as people (SEOs, admittedly) understood how it worked. When PageRank was patented, link spam was an aberration. As that blackhat technique grew (in response to the implementation of PageRank), PageRank's usefulness declined and it's very clear that the weight its given in ranking today is very minimal. That's why it "does not mean a PR5 will outrank a PR4," or even that a PR6 will outrank a PR4. If that "PR4" comes from a set of links that better satisfy other link-driven elements of the algorithm it will outrank a "PR6," even with on-page factors are equal.

In practice, though, pages for which other linking elements have been properly managed will incidentally get a good PageRank (that's why I say that increasing PageRank can be one indicator of lnkbulding success, but isn't useful as a goal itself). On the other hand, a good PageRank does not necessarily mean, for example, an optimal hub score/authority score relationship. Which is why there are so many webmasters querying on so many forums as to why their "PR6 site" is being beaten by a competitor's "PR5 site." PageRank myopia.