Andy Steggles of SitePR Tracker gives a interesting interview on the importance or non importance of Page Rank in search engine ranking results. He brings up some interesting points about how Page rank does not really help a site’s PR, but it does allow you to see how Google rates the page. I’m not positive I buy everything, but some of it does make sense. Like the test he did with duplicate content. He works on a site that accepts submissions from people on the web who then also submit the content elsewhere. This invokes the duplicate content penalty from Google as well as lowered the page rank. Rewriting the content of 100 pages to unique content produce a jump from PR0 to PR 4 for a lot of these sites. So this is another reason to avoid PLR content that has not been changed enough to make it unique. You be the judge as to whether this is important to your site or not.

The video can be seen here. Its definitely a good watch for someone who is interested in improving the page rank and search positions in one’s websites.

There has been a lot of talk lately about how social networks use of the nofollow tag and how it hurts you in the SE’s. A lot of sites now employ this tag including blogs and forums. I’ve been using a little Firefox plugin named SEOQuake lately and one thing this plugin does is to draw a line through links with the nofollow tag defined. The plugin also tells you a lot of other information about sites including backlinks, site index in the various engines etc. Any way you should check it out.

Well I did a little test and I showed over 500 links into this blog( not bad being thats its only been live a few weeks and I have not did any link partner campaigning). All these links come from signatures in forum posts and from the social networks. In almost everyone one of these cases, the nofollow attribute is set on these sites, but they still are showing up as backlinks. This number of links even though quite a few are PR0 should be enough to give at least a PR4 on the next update. So then we’ll see if this is really true or not.