Here's a fresh perspective on the value of pagerank, by Mike Grehan, writing on ClickZ Experts:

What Price PageRank?

Much of this makes sense to me. All of my sites are PR5 or PR6, but I've never focused on PR. What I want is qualified visitors who find a site they can enjoy enough to explore, participate and buy. Mike's article seems to validate this perspective.

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Rick Wheat, Wheatworks Software, LLC
CustomCalcs.com : Marketing Software with Your Brand

Thanks for the link. I look foward to reading the White Paper.

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Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

Grehan is an interesting writer. What I find missing in "What Price Page Rank" is what Google may be doing to recognize 'bought' links and to devalue them. There appears to be two trends in Google Search: (1) the value of a link has shifted from the 'link' itself to 'how you obtain' the link and how it blends in with your website, and (2) a slow morphing from link-centric to content centric search.

Great link. The real estate market, being so saturated with fairly web/internet savvy individuals, makes it almost impossible for agents/businesses beyond the first 20 listings in a search engine to get much play. And the way the engines keep changing algorithms, rules and regs makes it almost impossible to stay on top of what you've done, are doing, or plan to do to promote yourself.

I think you're absolutely correct. Chasing down tips and tweaking sites to conform to the latest rumor is enough to make one crazy. The foundation one stands on regarding search engines has got to be quality content. The daily concern about the latest "how to" is often time-consuming and certainly frustrating.

The se analogy to "location, location, location" is "content, content, content". There has to be something special on a site for the people who actually visit.

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Rick Wheat, Wheatworks Software, LLC
CustomCalcs.com : Marketing Software with Your Brand