My Single Mom Life

There's a lot of people talking about PR lately. PR is Google's page rank system and they just updated PR last week and the week before.
Some people's PR went up, others went down, and most people stayed the same.
A lot of people are just now figuring out what PR is and now they want to increase theirs. Mostly because for paying jobs, income for your blog, you need to have a good PR.
I've been blogging for almost 10 years, I've read up on it, studied my own stats, studied the stats of others, and watched what happens to blogs during PR updating.
Sometimes it ain't pretty.
So here is what I've personally witnessed and what I have done to increase my PR over the years and maintain it this year.

PR is the value of a website. The more incoming (most valuable) and outgoing links of importance a site has, the higher their PR is.
It's all about traffic. A really good site will have not only good content, but it will have the stats to match. Between stats and content, the site becomes important.

Your site needs to have good content to keep visitors coming back. We all have days, myself included, when all I did was make a damn sandwich or do my dishes, but for the most part, I am able to retain the visitors I get.
I don't always get a lot of comments, that's ok, because I know the people are still reading, still visiting.
I look at my reports once a week and know that on certain days, it drops, and certain days it goes up, but all in all, visitor retention is at 75%.
That's pretty damn good for a blog.

Javascripted blogrolls on your blogs sidebar do absolutely nothing for links for you other than make it easy for you to bloghop.
The site that carries and transmits your blogroll code, is getting those hits, not you. If you look at your stats, you'll see blogrolled hits, they start off with something like: http://blogrolling.com and the code to the other persons blogroll.
That code that brought them to your blog, is not a direct link from the higher ranked blog if it is higher ranked, it's a hit from blogrolling. To increase your PR, you need direct links, direct hits.

Try not to use coded carnival widgets etc. Those sites are getting your traffic hits!
Instead, post the carnival on your page, post your participants on your page. When other people want to post they've done theirs for the week, have them post it in your comments. Now, your site has all the links and their site will get direct links. No middle man stealing your hits. Those widget doohickies are awfully cool looking, but they are stealing your direct hits and links, which are important to your sites ranking.

My blogroll is on my site. In a fold away box so the bots can't even read it.
I surf from my google feed reader and open all the blog feeds in new tabs to read and leave comments on them.
By leaving comments on those blogs, I am directly linking my blog to theirs.

I link to other blogs in my posts and other blogs link me back.
Like last night for example.
Latte'girl wrote a post about me using a direct link to me.
I saw it in my stats, read the post, loved it and had to share and say thanks, that was awesome.
So I posted a quote from her post, linked to her blog, and then linked directly to her post about me.
That was one direct link for me, 2 direct links for her.
That's how you increase your incoming and outgoing links to help you increase your page rank.
Quality content with direct linking = another content rich post with direct linking back.

So anyway, there ya go. It's what I've noticed and figured out. I do what works and what doesn't.
But it truly boils down to content. Good content will get attention and links. It's a s simple as that.