HELP = Google Page Rank General Confusion

Hello, (( please read ))

My website has been up for about 18 to 19 months now, our Pagerank I've seen as high as a 3 for our website, and a 2 for our Forum, our Wordpress Blog is very new and the pages aren't even ranked yet.

Over the time we've been up I've checked my PR and many a time it tells me PR 3, which I consider low but normal for our site, it's been this for like 8 months now. Yet at other times all the servers are down and I get N/A or 0. Today I went to a few sites and I'm getting 0/10 and I check other sites, and they are giving there normal PR, like vbulletin.com PR 6, etc.

As far as vbSEO I'm not about to give a review yet and will state that I have indexed pages for my website on Google, Yahoo, and even Live search I believe.

The issue I'm having is I'm not understanding why my PR of my forum today is showing a PR 2, and my website is a PR 0.

We have had registrations everyday, not huge amounts as the forum is still young but multiple registrations daily, I have 230 blog entries on my wordpress which are all importing into the forums and members are posting as well, so there easily is content being created.

I have over 3 pages of Wordpress comments of one's that I've ALLOWED, not even including the spammers that I'm not allowing there comments to go through.

We do link exchanges but I check them every 3 months to make sure they are still linking to us and we try to avoid Top Site programs as they don't seem to help as much as people think.

About a week ago one of our threads "Hell's Kitchen Season 4 Winner" which was a poll for when the television show was going on for like 6 weeks, well in one day there were like 1500 page views on that thread alone, so we're also getting traffic and that thread...until the finale came out and the news articles popped up was actually on page 1 of google for weeks.

So I'm lost as to why my PR is a 0, or if Google is recalculating??? Any other thoughts as to what is going on?

Another thing is I go into Google Webmaster Tools and it tells me that Google last indexed my site or whatever on June 20, and it's July 10th now. 20 days later, yet in our php file there is a code you put that states how often you want google to check your site, and we put it for every 2 days. Should this be adjusted, are we doing something wrong here, or what are your thoughts, go ahead and speculate...even if you don't know.

I appreciate any help, any questions please ask.

We also bought Oleg's sitemap generator unlimited - blocked the forum as per advice given since it was pointless as the other sitemap was handling that, and use the vbSEO google sitemap thing for the forum

My website:

http://www.legionofangels.net

Forum:

http://www.legionofangels.net/forum/

Wordpress News Archive:

http://legionofangels.net/wpnews/

We also bought Oleg's sitemap generator unlimited

What is this?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

What is this?

Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator

I assumed since he had the same name as the Oleg here, that it was his company/product.

We use it for everything that isn't the forum.

PR is worthless, meaningless, and has 0 bearing on your rankings.

your best bet is to ignore it completely.

i got FAR more traffic now as a PR0 than i did as a PR6

Originally Posted by briansol

PR is worthless, meaningless, and has 0 bearing on your rankings.

your best bet is to ignore it completely.

i got FAR more traffic now as a PR0 than i did as a PR6

Thank you brian, I know you from many sites, your a good chap, and I appreciate the response.

But whether it's worthless or not, I want to know why it's doing this because it makes no sense to me whatsoever. Call it my need to know, or I want to understand why it would do that.

PR is based mostly on links-in, and the quality of those links-in. So, basically no matter what you do, you have zero control over your PR.

Originally Posted by briansol

PR is based mostly on links-in, and the quality of those links-in. So, basically no matter what you do, you have zero control over your PR.

Let me ask one final question on "link in's" then.

If we did Link Exchanges with other websites, I go to there sites and see my link, but in Google Webmaster Index Stats where it lists sites that link to us, I don't see those links. Is that because Google isn't indexing there sites, or why would the link be there, but not in Google's panel counting the link towards me?

That is the sites we link exchange with:

http://www.legionofangels.net/forum/loalinks.php

in general, link exchanges are a no-no. google doesn't like it. All links should be NATURAL for best results

Understanding Google PageRank Versus Pure "Link Value" - vBulletin SEO Forums

Originally Posted by briansol

in general, link exchanges are a no-no. google doesn't like it. All links should be NATURAL for best results

I thought paid link exchanges were bad, but natural one's between friends websites are ok.

Am I wrong?

Is the goal eventually to have enough good content that other sites just start linking to you because they are impressed with what your site has for content?

natural links occur within context. Like,

"I was at Yahoo! today and noticed....."

links in the footer or 'link pages' all do pretty much nothing.