During my journey in make money online, I have concluded that one of the major mistakes that people are keep doing is to rely your online money making campaign on Google PageRank.
Totally misleading and entirely wrong decision. Why?
PageRank, as you might already knew, is a measurement from 1 to 10 of how Google rank sites based on their popularity, of course, in the eyes of Google. Having a PageRank 7 is way much better than having a PageRank 3.
Does having a high PageRank help you rank higher in search engine result pages? Not necessarily.
There are PageRank 0 web pages that rank #1 on a certain keyword, because it’s popular in the eyes of Google. For instance, getting linked by an .edu (educational sites) is worth more than even 1000 .com links.
So again, PageRank is not related to your ability to rake in traffic.
One of my blogs received about 700 visits with 400 uniques every day with a PageRank 3, while my other blogs only receive about 100 visits with 50 uniques every day with a PageRank 5. Who makes more money? No brainer – the former one.
You see, all I can do with a PageRank 5 is selling links (90% links with dofollow attribute,) while I can do much more thing with my PageRank 3 site with good incoming traffic from search engines.
Of course, having a PageRank 5 with high traffic is very desirable, but it’s not the case that everyone can achieve 
So, a conclusion: Will having a high PageRank help? Yes – It might get you good money on limited time (until you get caught by Google selling links, and penalised your PageRank) and it’s good for your ego 
(It’s a standard uses by many to measure SEO and link building success.)
Having said that, can I rely on PageRank? Of course not, if your vision is long term. If your make money onilne method involves buying dropped domains with high PageRank, sell links, and forget, this could be very, very lucrative
I do try that before – buy a PageRank 5 domain name, set a simple site, sell links, and rake in dollars after dollars, until it gets Page Rank 0 – penalised by Google for selling links 
Believe me, link building and SEO are worthless in the above case – On that site, I’ve build well from nothing to something and have several PR6 backlinks with almost 15,000 in back links. Plain useless, if you sell links…
So, there you go. Will you rely on Google PageRank to make money online? You could, but you will become what a colleague called me before: A link pimp. ‘Your choice…
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I am no fan of Page Rank. I have pages with no Page Rank that have bunches of do follow links to them and 0 PR but the pages rank extremely well. So I don’t pay attention to PR just rankings and traffic.
Spot on! I like the phrase ‘A link pimp’ I’m going to use that one.
Thanks Ed! :)
Boris, I agree - I've relied on Page Rank for quite a long time in the past, and doing so is really disappointing. PR, to me, is just an indicator - traffic and SERPs position are kings!
i have to agree with you about the page rank thing, its not exactly fair. however being able to do seo on your own gets tougher and tougher nowadays
Hi whitey, Yes - I admit that SEOing your site is getting harder and harder these days - thanks to the growing importance of SERP and the willingness of site owners to throw thousands of dollar for SEO purposes. I think about it this way: If you want to rank 1st on Google SERP with the same keywords I target, you spend X amount of money. If I want to beat you, I have to spend >X logically. This way, SEO services is getting more and more expensive and harder to do, as well.
I don’t think that pagerank is totally useless. It is a very important money making factor for the bloggers who do sponsored reviews!
You are very right PR means nothing. Personally I beat out websites in the make money niche all the time with my PR 1 online business blog and PR2 website. In fact the top site in the make money niche is grizzlies blog which has a PR of 2 yet stays on top beating out PR 5,6, and even 7 sites. I was amazed to find it beat out forbes. Anyway excellent post, PR is not worthless though selling a link on a PR 5 or 6 will bring in alot more money than selling a link on a PR 2 or 3, I shouldn’t talk like that though since buying and selling links are against google webmaster guidelines;)
Thomas, No - not totally useless. However relying on it is useless - If you have a money making PR5 site and you start doing paid reviews and selling links, you will find - sooner or later - your PR drops. Google seems to hate anything related to monetizing your sites by relying on PR. Thanks for your opinion :)
Kris, I agree. One of my colleague is even making $2000+ a month from his PR0 site! I've also sell links before, using PR as leverage. End result: Most of my PR selling sites are dropped in PR, many to PR0. LOL!
Would Google punish a high PR site even if they are link because they want to share sites. (not money reasons). How does it tell if a site is linking to share PR or linking to share info naturally?
Dave, Your question is a controversial issue among SEO specialists and web masters :) Google does have a system in place to "read" your page code for "blacklisted keywords" such as "purchase a link," "buy a link," and such. Some, including me, suspect that Google does that on random basis, as not all sites with "link selling for PR" practice are being penalized by Google. The safest way to ensure your site preserves its PR is by having ALL outbound links to use "nofollow" tag :)
Interesting post. I’ll have to rethink page rank. Thanks for the info!
Selling links is not worth it if you value your long-term future with Google. Sooner or later they’re going to catch up with you, and as you say, your domain becomes worthless after you get banned.
i have to agree with you about the page rank thing, its not exactly fair
Lucien, Yes - Some people rant how Google is playing God. My take: People rant because they don't know the risk they are exposed to. If people gain more understanding on how Google PageRank works, they can take precautions if they decide to do with anything related to Google PR :)
Nice post. I believe PageRank(PR) should only be part of a link building campaign. PR juice is nice to have but focusing entirely on that little green bar is not the way to go as there are other benefits of getting links like instant direct traffic. Small PR sites can give loads of traffic as well. So PR might not be the most accurate way of evaluating a website’s traffic levels.
Jean, Spot on - PR and traffic are not really related, after all... In advertising terms, focusing on PR will attract you PR juice-seeking advertisers, that IMO are not as "everlasing" as traffic-based advertising.
I completely agree with what you said about PR and traffic being unrelated but sometimes you will notice that some high PageRank sites usually have tons of traffic for instance most if not all PR 8-9 authority sites have tons of traffic with alexa ranking under 1000. But like I said, PR is not the most concise way to judge traffic levels and I wouldn’t use it for this purpose. For example, you can have a PR 4 website with an alexa of 500,000 and on the other hand a PR 2 website with an alexa of 30,000. The PR 2 is higher traffic. So in some cases, PR is totally misleading. You’d still be better off with Alexa for better traffic analysis even though Alexa might not be 100% accurate.
I definitely agree about traffic-based advertising and it’s a smart marketing strategy. If you were to buy advertising for the sake of PR juice, it’s not a too good idea as PR can fluctuate and your advertising might only be for short term. Focusing on the traffic aspect can yield a better return on investment(ROI).
Page rank was much more valid for making money a few years back when you could easily sell out without the risk of losing it. As far as ranking goes though, relevance of backlinks has more importance than pr of backlinks. PR of page itself has very little relevance, look at the pr of the site ranking 1st for Make Money Online…Griz is a legend, but it shows PR is not important for ranking.
Agreed - Today, if Google see your dofollow links unnecessarily on your blog, your will be penalised. And yes, relevance is king...
Of course, having a PageRank 5 with high traffic is very desirable, but it’s not the case that everyone can achieve
Any feedback from you?