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and everyone is rushing to get as many backlinks as they can. People interlinking their sites to squeeze out as much juice and get that extra pagerank point. All in vain.

After reading this super informative article on digitalpoint,  I have learned the error of our ways. This is how Google and pagerank really work.

Google takes a screenshot of your webpage MONTHS before the toolbar update.

The screenshot being of course not visual, but of the backlink count you have. How am I so sure? Follow along…

First pick a nice big site where every page gets pagerank, like mattcutts blog 

Next, we go through each month’s archive until we see which month has actual toolbar pagerank.

• July - Nope
• June - Nope
• May - Nope
• April - PR7

Okay, so Google took a screenshot somewhere in April, but when? So we start cycling through all the posts until we come to April 2nd

So the latest Google update was on April 2nd.

Another site with the same results - http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/4/2/ - the later articles dont have PR whereas the first few do, meaning Google took the screenshot early in the day.

So next time the toolbar updates, don’t fret. You’ve already missed the big linking rush.

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Ever wanted to know how many backlinks would get you that pagerank you wanted? Here is a chart of approximations for how many links you would need to get the various page ranks:

Courtesy of http://www.kenkai.com/google-pagerank-table.htm

This is truly a fantastic chart and I’d have to say the numbers do seem very reasonable (and congruent with my webpages and their PR). Of course these are all estimations but don’t expect a PR6 from 5 PR7 links.

The most important this is to have these backlinks with good, quality anchor text. This will not only increase your PR (which really doesn’t matter) but more importantly increase your targeted traffic and cash flow.

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