The Secret to Increasing Page Rank?

Yaro Starak recently speculated that the way to increase your page rank quickly was to have a higher PR page link to you. And he concluded that that's all there is to the secret of getting a higher page rank. And that the wonderful result is that your site will be awarded a page rank just one less than the PR of the page that linked to you.

Everyone knows you can increase your PR by getting more links. The interesting new speculation is that your PR can quickly move up to just one level less than the highest ranked site that links to you.

In this last PR update, I've found this is true.

I've had three or four blogs for a year now. But none of them rank above PR3. I started my newest blog just three months ago. Soon after, a PR5 site linked to it off the blogroll section of their main page.

And as a result, in the latest PR update, I suddenly jumped from PR0 to PR4 for this brand new blog. I was quite surprised, as one of my PR3 blogs has a loyal and relatively large audience but it did not budge in PR and suddenly this newest upstart beat it and was now the highest ranked blog in my little stable.

Mind you, a few PR4 and PR3 sites have also linked to this new blog. So it may be that you not only need one higher level PR site to link, but also several lower level ones.

If this is indeed the underlying mechanism of how to increase page rank then it has some huge implications for people who want to be found on Google's search pages.

It provides another reason why blogs may have an advantage over corporate sites. How many people are going to link to Home Depot off their main page for example? I ran across one beautifully developed site with hundreds of quality content pages. It's a hardware store that has over 100 retail outlets in North America. Their page rank? Zero PR. Who is going to link to them off their main page? Very few people. They will get links from within individual posts but this will not help their page rank status.

But if you have a popular blog for example, you are much more likely to get many more high-level links.

As your page rank definitely affects where you stand in the search engine rankings, this will create an advantage for blogs over corporate sites. The spam blogs will continue to have low or zero PR but the quality blogs with many links will be able to get first search page listings.

If PR works this way, it also means more people will be sucking up to the higher PR blogs in the sense of asking for links. The higher PR blogs (six and above) will be able to charge for links to other sites off their main pages.

If this is indeed the key secret to increasing page rank what else would this result imply?