I fail to see his point as to why the site would need to maintain a low PageRank. The only time he even addresses that point is with the following:
By purposefully maintaining a low ranking site, which has good on-page SEO (titles and headings), you can create a regular stream of small posts relevant to your subject matter, without having to create extensive, high-effort articles that your site/brand is known for.
But how does the PageRank of the site change your intentions for the type of posts you write? I would have just played it off as trying to make the post more popular by giving it a counter-intuitive theme, but then at the end of the post, he writes:
...please don’t link to it! It needs to maintain a low ranking to serve its original purpose.
So unless I'm misunderstanding, it sounds like he's saying, create a site full of trivial posts, but make sure that it maintains a low PageRank, so that it doesn't become popular and hurt your brand.
Why would it hurt your brand? Because you're not actually contributing anything useful. But if you're not contributing anything useful, then no one will link to it.*
The corollary is that if a lot of people link to it, you must actually be providing something useful. So you really have nothing to worry about.
* One caveat to that is if you write a meta-post about that site explaining its purpose and then a bunch of people link to it for that reason alone.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough in the article.
The point of the low PageRank is that it identifies the low-competition keywords/key-phrases. i.e. If you have a HIGH PR site, then you can rank pretty well for any key phrases, but if you have a LOW PR site, then you'll only rank for the key phrases that nobody else ranks for.
So, as you regularly post a range of topics on a low PR site, you'll only see search referrer traffic coming through for the subjects that have a 'gap'.
It's not really about the brand, that's just an aside.
Also, of course, ranking on Google is made up from hundreds of factors; PR is just one of them, but it's indicative of lots of the other factors (number, quality and diversity of incoming links).
Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense.
I think you overestimate the difficulty in ranking for keywords for which many others already rank, though. For instance, my relatively new consulting website ranks on the front page for common words/phrases, like "phusion passenger," and it only has a PR3.
Your article states that PR3 is low enough, but I would say that if you have good in-page SEO, etc, you really need a PR1 or PR2 to get the effect you're talking about.
If you just blog about everything you know and experience, eventually, some surprises will pop up in your Analytics. By virtue of the fact that you know something about these topics, they are viable for you to pursue further.
By purposefully maintaining a low ranking site, which has good on-page SEO (titles and headings), you can create a regular stream of small posts relevant to your subject matter, without having to create extensive, high-effort articles that your site/brand is known for.
But how does the PageRank of the site change your intentions for the type of posts you write? I would have just played it off as trying to make the post more popular by giving it a counter-intuitive theme, but then at the end of the post, he writes:
...please don’t link to it! It needs to maintain a low ranking to serve its original purpose.
So unless I'm misunderstanding, it sounds like he's saying, create a site full of trivial posts, but make sure that it maintains a low PageRank, so that it doesn't become popular and hurt your brand.
Why would it hurt your brand? Because you're not actually contributing anything useful. But if you're not contributing anything useful, then no one will link to it.*
The corollary is that if a lot of people link to it, you must actually be providing something useful. So you really have nothing to worry about.
* One caveat to that is if you write a meta-post about that site explaining its purpose and then a bunch of people link to it for that reason alone.