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Getting inbound links to boost your PR is another thing. I find that quite confusing. The basic principle is OK. the more you have - the higher your PR. But.... does the PR only travel to the page that is linked to or does it boost the PR of the home page as well.
I have a PR6 site ( home page. others are less ) and I want to get it up to a PR8. I admit that this is just a vanity thing. A pure ego trip if you like, but do I need to encure that the links are to the index page or will any links coming into the site ( I think you call it deep linking! ) count?
does the PR only travel to the page that is linked to or does it boost the PR of the home page as well
A certain amount of PR from Page A is passed through a link to Page B. If Page B has a link to Page C, then a certain amount of PR is passed from Page B to Page C, etc., etc.
So, if an internal page on your site has a link from an external page and to your home page, some of the PR will pass through to the home page.
You can find more info on PR at WW's Google Knowledge Base [webmasterworld.com]. It includes links to some of the tech papers if you want to dig deeper.
PR6 to PR8 can be quite a leap. Keep those external links coming in!
Is there any way of telling how many links it takes to move from one PR to the next or is that a "how long is a piece of string " type question. I am thinking of sites like Amazon who must have millions of links but there must be other sites with an equal PR who have less links....
It all depends. The PR is determined not by the number of links to a page, but the amount of PR passed to the page. So, a link from a PR8 page passes more PR than a link from a PR4 page.
(Sometimes a handful of very high PR links will dramatically increase PR. For many high PR, recognizable name sites this is usually not the case since they have many thousands of links from sites all along the PR range.)
And, since PR is passed to each linked page, the amount of PR that passes from a page also depends on the number of links on that page.
And, there's a dampening factor that takes into account whatever the heck it takes into account (see links to tech papers in the knowledge base in the above post).
So, the formula might work out something like this:
Passed PR = (PR of page * Dampening Factor) / Number of Links on the Page
It's been guessed that the dampening factor is somewhere around .85.
One way to see how many links it takes to raise PR is to turn on the Google toolbar and do a search for http, go to each site then check the number of backlinks Google returns.
(There are some current inconsistencies with Google so you might want to do a backlin search on alltheweb using this syntax: link.all:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com.)
And dig into those tech papers, they can be fascinating bedtime reading.
