If you have been following this thing, you have probably been hanging on the edge of your seat. These quixotic quests are great story fodder, aren't they? No matter what happens, the audience gets a good show. If the hero fails, we can laugh at him for being such a fool or lament his tragedy without actually having to experience it firsthand. If the hero succeeds, it gives us hope that we too might someday conquer the insurmountable obstacles in our own lives.

I don't know if I'll ever make PR3 again, and I don't really care. Don't get me wrong: The mission remains in effect, but it is not as urgent. Page rank, I am finding, does not matter in the great grand scheme of things. I know. It's a shocker.

Forget the great grand scheme of things: page rank doesn't even matter much in the SEO game. I have a site at PR4. It is dead. Hundreds of pages only ever read by spammers' spiders. This little site, at PR0, is chugging along and actually comes up pretty high for some pretty decent search strings. The Google works in mysterious ways. It's "Google Page Rank," but it does not seem to weigh heavily on how the almighty algorithm determines the value of your content. You really have to love Google. They deliver the best content, regardless of how respectable the container.

You know what the algorithm really likes? Freshness. You can bring a page back from the dead by changing a few words. This does not work for pages that were never alive, but if the page ever came up near the top of the SERPs for some semi-valuable term, it can be revived this way. I guess the great Knower of All up on Mount Googleplex figures that if you're updating your page, it must be to the betterment of the page's quality.

Takeaway: Show a little love to your old, dead pages, and watch them spring back to life on the search engines.

Wow, I have meandered far off topic: The progress of my little quest to regain the respectability this site once had, that little badge of honor known as PR3.

The links exploded again last week, somehow. Webmaster Tools reports that there are now 171 incoming links! How frickin' nifty is that! I don't know how many links it takes to reach PR1, but it's more than 171 because I'm still not there. One week left in the month, and my goal was to make it by the end of the month. Gulp. This one's coming right down to the wire, folks. It won't kill me to push the goal out a month, but it will injure my pride.

Anyway, I'm pleased about the growing number of inbound links, up nearly tenfold in a single month by following the simple strategy of posting somewhat regularly and linking out to totally awesome related content. This strategy has worked better than I expected. It just goes to show that being a good citizen does pay off. (Now I really feel like Don Quixote. The mission was PR3, not inbound links! Damn windmills just never cooperate. Like the good Don, though, I shall be happy for what I get and soldier on.)

Whether or not the Big G will reward me by pinning that little PR1 ribbon on my chest remains to be seen. Stay tuned.