Sharper - 1:26 am on Sep 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

"In other words, internal 'votes' for yourself don't count. "

The problem with this statement is that they do, and it's really easy to tell that they do. You can set the PR of a page based on the link structure of your website. You can pretty easily predict what a page's PR is going to be purely based on where you link to it from your other internal pages, especially if it has no external links.

If I want to create a page with PR 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 or 0 for a particular site of mine, all I have to do is link to it correctly from an internal page of higher PR and wait for Google to spider it.

I think the most misunderstood concept about this whole thing is that a site doesn't have a PR number, only pages do. It doesn't matter who or what is linking to a page, internal or external, it's still a link.

I will grant you that a site can have a theme, anchor-text, etc... that can also be taken into account in SERPS, but for PR purposes, it's the pages that matter. The site is irrelevent except for how the other pages in the site are linked together.

But I'll tell you what. I'll trade you a link from any PR 6 homepage of yours on any topic for a link from a PR 1 content page of mine that is on-topic for your link, on a site with a PR 7 homepage. I'm willing to do that all day long, because it isn't the site, it's the page that matters for PR.