Hat tip to Todd at Blog Fiesta for pointing out that Google reshuffled the Page Rank deck. This post started as a comment and question for Todd, then it got to be really long, then I decided to make it a post.

For anyone who finds themselves struggling to generate new content (bloggers block), this is a great way to push through the plateau–taking a comment into a new post.

My comment/question:

Hey Todd…

Question:

Can you explain what Page Rank means in tangible terms? As in, what are the demonstrated differences and/or advantages between a site that is a PR4 and one thats a PR5 (and 6 or 7 for that matter).

In your experience, are proper SEO tactics (whatever they are) and Page Rank closely affiliated?

Then I got to thinking (although I’d still like to hear Todd’s answer)…It doesn’t seem that PR has much to do w/ SEO.

I don’t follow status-quo SEOnomics advice but my site is a PR5, has been for the past few Google PR shuffles. A PR5 supposedly requires some hard core, intense SEO-Fu to achieve…except I don’t practice SEO-Fu. The one time I did, I got the beat down.

Wrote a post titled ‘The Best Mortgage Blog‘ in September 2007. 72 hours later I searched Google and Yahoo! for ‘The Best Mortgage Blog’ and *bang* #1 on page 1 of the organic results on all three SERP’s. This post resided in top position for this term for quite sometime (I stopped looking in December).

Today, if you type in The Best Mortgage Blog on Google, you cannot find the post, even if you extend the Search to ‘The Best Mortgage Blog xbroker’. Can’t find it via their Blog Search page either (the post is still #1 on Yahoo). So it appears The Google hath punished me. How they flesh this out is beyond me.

I don’t know how they do it, but I believe that Google pays very close attention to how you ‘build your blog’. If you try to implement crafty SEO tactics based on what pundits say will increase your PR, you’re more likely to be penalized (or marginalized) than rewarded. I’m not talking about black hat stuff (sure way to get penalized and even banned from the SERP’s), but rather any strategy thats designed to try and manipulate Google’s mysterious omnipotent algorithmic brain.

From Googles site regarding Page Rank:

Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult.

In other words, don’t even try to figure this out.

My lone SEO practice resides in a plug-in for WordPress: The All-In-One SEO pack, which prods me for keywords, a short description and a title. Thats it. The only time I’m even remotely ‘SEO conscious’ is when choosing a title, trying to pen the verbiage as to how a human may search for the content within a particular post, which may be a back asswards technique for all I know.

Other ‘SEO sins’ committed here, deemed counter intuitive to achieving a higher PR:

• A big blogroll and too many links on my home page (so they claim…)
• I submit some duplicate content to ActiveRain (because I enjoy the feedback from inter-industry professionals) and many Splogs scrape my content, increasing the apparent damaging duplicity.

Just write relevant, compelling articles about real estate and/or mortgage and you won’t have to worry about Page Rank and SEO

So that’s my $.02… improving Page Rank and ‘SEO Strategies’ are often disjointed and other times damaging to one another. But I’m still interested in what anyone else (especially an SEO-Fu artist or Page Rank guru) has to say, cause I’m no expert…