Google follows the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.  Nothing else much of us can do except try to do our best to understand.  Thanks for the post, very insightful.

Ha ha ha, that made me chuckle!

Mike, excellent post - thanks!

thx man!

My recent thinking is that Google uses PR to out it's competitors.  Because advertisers are focused on PR it is the perfect way for them to find who is buying/selling links and punish them accordingly.  Search traffic is not affected because that is where Google makes money from it paid links.  Google is just using PR to determine who its competitors are for paid links.  At the end of the day Google is no different from any of us in that they make their money selling links or advertising.  Logically they don't want sites buying links from you when they could be buying them from Google.

Not that any of us would ever have a clue how Google works, but I think Steve (Money Infant <-- as opposed to Money Adult) might be onto somehting here - what he is saying makes perfect sense!   A PR0 ranking will definitly affect your advertising revenue.

Van Beek @ Stock Trend Investing said:

Good post Mike. I post here the same question I put as a comment on your site: You state that a PR0 or PR3 blog could have way more visitors than a PR4 site. But what about natural search engine traffic. Would there be many PR3 blogs that get more natural search traffic from Google than PR4 blogs in that same niche?

PR has absolutely NO bearing whatsoever on search traffic. None. To answer your question, there could be a multitude of PR3 blogs that get more natural search traffic than PR4 blogs in the same niche. Tons. Example: my site used to be a PR5. Then it went down to PR2 for some reason and slowly started going back up. I'm now at PR4. I have several times the search traffic now as when I was a PR5. Go figure. PR is almost completely useless as a search traffic predictor.

What Kyle says ;-)

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. We just have to get rid of the 'absolute'.

Thank you

Maria

Good post Mike. I post here the same question I put as a comment on your site: You state that a PR0 or PR3 blog could have way more visitors than a PR4 site. But what about natural search engine traffic. Would there be many PR3 blogs that get more natural search traffic from Google than PR4 blogs in that same niche?

PR has absolutely NO bearing whatsoever on search traffic. None. To answer your question, there could be a multitude of PR3 blogs that get more natural search traffic than PR4 blogs in the same niche. Tons. Example: my site used to be a PR5. Then it went down to PR2 for some reason and slowly started going back up. I'm now at PR4. I have several times the search traffic now as when I was a PR5. Go figure. PR is almost completely useless as a search traffic predictor.

I know that some of you have suffered from the latest Google PR update. Or you have been hit by the Panda Update last year. 

I've written a post on how I've survived Google for the past 6 years. It's a 3,000 words article telling you each step I've followed to become more independent from the big G and make money from my blog.

You can read this post here: Can You Survive Google?

Enjoy!

Mike.