Imagine a situation where you have started a great site with exceptional design and high quality content. Your pagerank of course is zero and you alexa traffic rank is somewhere in the 18th lack or perhaps more. You want to bring visitors to your site and hence want it included in the search results but the search bots are taking their own time caching your site. Finally the googlebot caches your site and you say, what the heck, I am through. But to your dismay you find your site way deep down even for a non competitive keyword.
You feel a bit down but have the belief that getting some quality inbound links will solve the issue. You start reaching sites with your link request but alas no one seems to be answering. Of course they want a link from a site having a good PR and not with a site having a PR of zero irrespective of the quality. In fact quality just doesn't seem to matter in today's internet which is all but pagerank. If your site has a good page rank you are the king or else no one is ever going to bother about you.
So the only option left before you now is to get links from directories, blogs, forums etc. and hope for the best. You do your best and wait for a PR update. After months of waiting the PR updates do happen but your pages get no more than PR3. You feel great about it though thinking 'something is better than nothing'. Now again you approach sites for a link exchange but to your sheer disappointment find that good sites never respond to you. All you seem to be getting are links from relatively unknown and low quality sites. You develop hundreds of low quality links and wait for the next PR update which seems an eternity to arrive. You have strong faith that for all those links you established your site will surely get a higer PR, but nothing of that sort happens. Your PR increases but not more than PR4. Then you realize that PR is exponential in nature. God forbid, you feel like cursing the PR system but you are left with no choice but to continue racing against the odds to get links. You become a link maniac getting links from all corners of the internet; after some time you realize that you are spending considerable amount of time getting inbound links and almost negligible amount of time on your website. You have not updated content for months now and your visitors are starting to turn away from your site.
One fine day you read an article that google has started penalzing sites that resort to getting unnatural links with an objective to cheat its ranking system. A few sweat drops escape from your face as you realize you have been spamming guestbooks and giving links to link farms. You also find you have cross linked with many sites actively taking part in link farms. You also find that you have got links from free for all sites. All these can lead you into trouble so in a frenzy you start removing links to those sites after mailing them and explaining them the reason. Finally the PR update happens and you get a PR of 5. You have entered the land of the lords now and you escaped getting penalized. You think, 'what a heap load of hardwork getting a quality site to rank, I wonder how these junk sites make it to the top?'. And ask yourself a question, 'Is a site only as good as its PR??' or 'Is the internet only meant for big shots who can invest considerable amount of time and money on optimization?'. The answer to this is probably yes which you gulp down with a pinch of salt.
