Help Me Understand PR

Ok. So I thought I understood PR. Got quite a few sites with PR, and quite a few without. The few with have fresh content and/or I've done linkbuilding and traffic campaigns for them....point being I've driven attention to them to command some sort of PR. Then the sites that I have just let chill and do nothing with have naturally lost their PR altogether or been reduced to a PR1 or 2. No biggie. Was expected. But what I did not expect was when I went to my squidoo lens today to play around with it and found it to be a PR2......

I did 1000000000000000000000000% nothing to this page except this:

1. created the account.
2. made a lens page and put two articles on it and about 5-7 keywords.
3. "rated" it with the squidoo bot [and sheen91 was cool enough to add it to his rotation for a bit too so that in the end I had a total of 300+ ratings.
4. I added two more articles about two weeks later and about 5-7 more keywords.
5. stumbled the page.

The end. PR2. If there is a single link posting to my squidoo lens on anyone's site, it is not because of any efforts on my part. That is just how much effort I have put into this particular lens. I have not had a real need to promote this page just yet so that is why I have not cared to do anything with it promotion-wise. But I was surprised to go to the page and see a pr2 on it. I even browsed other people's lens to see if their pages had pr and they showed none. I'm baffled. How is it that it has a PR? I have done NOTHING more than what I have already listed. Dead damn serious.

Thats pretty cool. It could be that the links you received from the articles passed enough pagerank to make your site a PR2...or possibly that a high PR site reprinted your articles on their site and kept the resource box in tact.

I've heard many varying opinions on pagerank. Howie Schwartz says he pays zero attention to it nowadays as many PR0 pages rank very highly..He thinks it has little to nothing to do with rankings now. He said turn it off on your Google toolbar and forget about it...I also noticed the pagerank of several #1 sites from the StomperNet boys took a dip from PR6 to PR4...but still rank #1.

So i guess it's hard to say if PR is a major ranking factor anymore...hope this at least gives you some insight..

PageRank is Google. Ok, to clear that up...PageRank is the kernel of Google, if you will. Their whole idea plan Google when it was still an idea was to create a search engine that would rank sites in such a way as to deliver the most relevant results to the searching audience.

At the core of PageRank is the link. Google sees a link as an independent editorial endorsement of the page contents.

Not to pimp my page...but...

I tried explaining PR to one of my clients and it wasn't going well so I told them I would put it in an email. The email turned into a blog post and this is the result. Please give thanks if you find it useful.

Highlights of PR:
1. Google is ALWAYS calculating PR but they only report it about 4 times a year.
2. If you give away a link you give away PR from that page.

More details and pretty pictures in my blog post about PR sculpting.

Let me know if you have any questions after reading.

But to answer your question directly would take a bit of investigation but my guess is that your page was favorited by few people on Sqidoo or something like that. My best guess is that it was featured internally on Squidoo somehow and if you don't upadate your page regularly it will drop in PR.

Thanks,

JD

3. "rated" it with the squidoo bot [and sheen91 was cool enough to add it to his rotation for a bit too so that in the end I had a total of 300+ ratings.

Does this step give you links on any other pages? I'm not overly familiar with Squidoo.

Also did you perchance get a high PR internal link, like from a Squidoo tag page?

eh. duplicate post.

I'm really looking into figuring this out too, I have incoming links and all but for some reason my page isn't getting ranked...