It seems to me that everyone out there who intends to monetize their website wants to know how to get their page rank to a certain level. I can tell you now I have no idea what the answer is to these questions. My best advice is to create useful content and market yourself. Hopefully people will find you interesting enough to link to and that will push up your rank.

Now, because I know that even for me that answer is not “good enough” and I still want to know “how many links do I need to be a PR X” I have collected the following posts from other boards on the subject. Each post will be preceded by the board in which it was found.

Source of the following two: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/35069.htm

Hi all,

Regarding the “how many links” questions, I’ve found a page at seogeeks.com with the following claims:

To get the PR you want, you need about 18 links from pages with the same PR, assuming 50 links per page.

So if you want a PR7, you’ll need links from 18 PR7 pages, assuming each of these pages has about 50 outbound links. Alternatively, you could have 3 links from PR8 pages.

Well, that’s just what they say. I don’t know how current that information is. And can’t remember the exact url 🙂

and…

As a rough guide (assumuing there is an exponential factor of 10 between PR levels) you can say that PR levels need a certain amount of PR ‘points’ passed to them from other pages:

PR1 needs 1 ‘points’
PR2 needs 10 ‘points’
PR3 needs 100 ‘points’
PR4 needs 1000 ‘points’
PR5 needs 10000 ‘points’

9The exponential nature of PR explains why getting to PR 9 and 10 is so tricky)

PR ‘points’given out by a page, again this is a simple example, can be roughly calculated by dividing the above values by the number of outbound links.

e.g. a PR3 with 20 links gives 5 ‘points’ to each page, this would move a page with no other inbound links to a PR1

Assuming that the pages that you get links from have an average of 20 links you would need 20,000 links from PR2 sites to get to a PR5. Likewise 2,000 links from PR3 sites would be required.

The good news is that you would only need 2 such links from PR6 sites to make it to PR5.

There are many more factors to consider such as dampening, the actual PR of a page can be PR?.0 to?.99 and make links worth different amounts from what appears to be thesame PR value etc.

I hope that helps

I like both of those answers. And no I didn’t do the math to see if they are in agreement. But at a glance it is easy to see that the higher rank a page is that links to you the more valuable it will be. Mathematically this is not exacly true (or perhaps more precisely it is not ALWAYS true, but it is USUALLY). Try to get links from others with high ranks. Or get gazillions of links from lower ranked sites.

Here’s a final comment from the same site:

Questions about “how many links” are almost impossible to answer because of the way Page Rank calculation works — the math behind is far from linear.

Here’s a thread that took the Page Rank equation apart to a degree – perhaps it will help you understand why there is no easy answer for your question.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34079.htm

Oh yeah, and supposedly pagerank only updates once a quarter or so. Bah.