Do links from Page Rank N/A count?

Page Rank is a google invented phenomena that assigns every site a page rank from zero to ten based on how many sites link to a site and the page rank of those individual sites. But wait there's more, there's also a page rank N/A.

Google is pretty transparent in showing how it ranks sites. There's some variance involved but it shows a lot of links in Google Webmaster tools and it shows what keywords it thinks your sites are about. In Google Webmaster Tools, it even gives insight into Latent Semantic Indexing by telling you how many variants of a particular keyword you use.

Google may fog up the data a bit so you can't see exactly how much each factor affects your search engine ranking but I still believe that Google provides information that correlates very strongly with how a websites search engine ranking is calculated.

That's why I believe the Page Rank N/A deliminator is highly significant. Why not have Page Rank 11? Why not just have PR 0 be PR N/A and then change the rest of the distribution to accommodate?

Because Google is trying to tell us something with the PR N/A. Google is trying to tell us that you can't get link juice from a PR N/A site. A site has to have a certain number of link juice flowing from it in order to start providing link juice?

Why would Google do this? Google tries to base it's search engine results on algorithms as much as possible. Google engineers are math whizzes who view doing anything manually as a computer programming sin. Google Engineers want to avoid doing manual reviews as much as possible. Think about the sites that might be PR N/A: Blog farms, social bookmarks, forum profiles, etc. All sites used by spammers.

Now theoretically you could build links to those sites to get them to be PR 0. But those blog farms could be shut down, you could be banned from social bookmarking sites, and the forum owners could remove your profile. Even using The Best Spinner and Unique Article Wizard is work. If your links get removed that's a lot of work down the drain.

There's not just a trust measurement that goes on between search engines and sites. There's a trust measurement between Internet Marketers and sites. People take more time building links to a site when they know that site is going to stay there. If you don't spam you article is going to stay on a site like hubpages(or some other article directory) or at least taken down until you can fix it. You build links to a site based on the fact that you trust your link is going to stay there.

Webmasters build more links to sites that they know won't link to casinos and porn and all the other no-no keywords that might diminish the power of their links. Now it's true that a webmaster might build links to a low quality site that offers revenue sharing in the hopes that someone will click out on an ad. But, that also means that the site must be of high enough quality to be accepted by those advertising programs.

There are other advertising programs that can be used by very low quality sites but they don't pay as much and webmasters will build links to sites with higher paying revenue programs preferentially.   So it would seem that not having Page Rank N/A pass link juice or keyword authority would be a good way to diminish the power of spammy links.

Does this mean that you shouldn't try to get Page Rank N/A links?  No.  Just because it's Page Rank N/A now doesn't mean it will always be that way. And you need Page Rank N/A links to make a page rank 0 page.  Just because page rank N/A doesn't pass link juice doesn't mean it doesn't pass page rank.

For social bookmarking sites start by building links to the profile page.  Once this gets to PR0 it will start transmitting link juice to all your bookmarks.  Then keep building links until your bookmarks start to hit PR0.  For many social bookmarking sites, each bookmark you create builds a link back to your profile making hitting PR0 easier.  However, not all social bookmarking sites do this such as She Told Me or KarmaLynx.  With those sites you can't rely on a critical mass of bookmarks eventually making your profile page hit PR 0.  With those sites you'll have to build external links to your submitted page.

You can also build links to individual social bookmarks as examples and you can probably bookmark them occasionally but many social bookmarking sites require that you bookmark the original article.  For forum profiles, the white hat way would be to say that these are my favorite forums and then link to your profile page.

So I want you to set a goal to achieve before the next PR update. Get PR 0 to all the pages of your website and get all your social bookmarking profiles to PR 0.  You won't regret the effect on your search engine rankings.