Fiction #1: If I just get a high PR score I’ll get all the traffic that I could possibly need.

Fact:  PageRank is only one factor that Google takes into account when displaying the results of a search. There are other factors that play an important role in your search engine ranking as well, such as your page’s title, keyword-rich content, and relevance. The moral of the story is not to obsess about your PR score. Use you time making a valuable site, with relevant links and keyword rich content instead.

Fiction #2: Google bases their PR on the amount of incoming links only.

Fact:  Not! In fact linking to a few “monster” sites with several hundred links sharing their PR won’t help you nearly as much as linking to several low PR sites with fewer outgoing links. Why? Because the formula for calculating the amount of PR a page passes on is the PR of the page, divided by the number of links going out. So if you link to a site with a PR of 8 and they have 80 outgoing links, including yours, then the amount of PR they give to your site is only 0.1. Not very much huh?

Fiction #4: If you link to “link farms” or any site with a large number of links you can get penalized or even banned by Google.

Fact: The truth is that the sites that you link to, regarding PageRank score and number of outgoing links, can effectively minimize the amount of PR that you gain from linking to those sites, but will not affect your current PR in any negative manner. You will not be banned by Google, or any search engine, for that matter. If that were true, just think of what you could do to your competition if you were so inclined.

Fiction #5: The PR score I have is for my entire site.

Fact: No, PR is about pages, not entire sites. Each page in your site has a different PR score and some can have dramatically different scores. This is why it is imperative that you understand the link procedures and ranking criteria in order to maximize the benefit you get from your hard earned links.