The vagaries of Page Rank

[partnermine]

I am, I think, being a good boy. I am not chasing page rank per se, but it does show a visible indicator to a client of the success or otherwise of the work I am doing on his website.

I inherited a rather badly implemented site from a designer who obeyed precisley no standards, used no H (etc) tags and used no alt text attributes (debatable value) in images.

A lot of work to correct most of that led to a toolbar PR of 3. I was pleased, but not overjoyed. So I worked hard on improving the content of the site and on creating valid inbound non reciprocated links. I still am.

My focus has been content, content, content. I've worked on the basis that I generate inbound links by having great content. The site is a dull but worthy news site to do with the unexciting topic of computer security. No gimmicks, just pdfs of whitepapers, useful articles, an outgoing RSS feed, a page of aggregated feeds from one of the major aggregators, and a phpBB messageboard where articles are discussed.

It is implemented in ASP (which I hate), but that should make no difference. The HTML is not properly W3C standard, but I am working on it. Regrettably it is not as simple as running (eg) Tidy on it, the implementer did a "fine job" and I am still unwrapping some of the oddities he left me with.

Each page has a good and valid title tag and a meta tag for content. After much thought I have not troubled with a keywords meta tag.

The site competes in SERPS with many other dull but worthy sites, and its search terms are common to many. I don't ever expect its position to be exceptional, and I drive traffic with rifled targeted PPC advertising, but I did think I would either maintain or improve my PR.

This month it has gone down to 2.

I thought "OK, maybe some of my newer pages will have a PR now." No. There seems to be a date threshold before which no PR is allocated that has not moved (for me at least) for months.

I would love some thoughts on whether I am working in the right lines majoring on content. I produce a new "newsworthy" page every 2 days or so, and publicise this on the RSS feed which is indexed by all the RSS directories I can find. What else should I be doing to influence the visible indicator of PR that my client sees? And does PR actually matter?

[partnermine]

When I talk about PR I am speaking mainly of the rank the home page has. Having re-read my post I can see that I am open to being criticised for "not realising that each page is individual" with regard to PR. I do know that, and it is implied, but I should, perhaps, have made it obvious that I knew.