What does Page Authority tell you about potential PageRank?

Two of the most common questions considered by any new website owner is:

Question 1 - What will my PageRank be?
Question 2 - When the hell are Google doing their next update?

The reason you should stop yourself before getting into either of these issues is simple, It doesn't matter and it really doesn't matter.

If you engage in a lot of writing and you have followed sound advice, to begin guest posting to build quality links to your website, you will have no doubt come across an ad for Guest Posting which goes something like this:

Technology article available entitled "Top 7 things you have read before no doubt" must be PageRank 3+

This annoys me for a lot of reasons. Here are 5 of my top pet hates about this kind of Guest Posting offer:

1. PageRank is like a snapshot in time, taken at the last Google update and bears no relevance to a websites value, in terms of traffic or link value. The reason for this is because you have no idea what has happened on that website between the last update and now. Websites change hands for good money and it may be a new owner, therefore will have a page rank in decline.
2. If you are going to pretend like you know SEO by stating a required PageRank you should probably already know that Page Authority is a much better indicator of strength. 
3. Why the hell would you exclude all those websites which will be ranked highly in the future but may be new, much better to check Domain Authority and see if the website is a good one, than relying on an update that happened 6 months ago.
4. Websites with huge volumes of traffic, don't need or want your free content with links. They make lots of revenue and can generate quality content by paying writers. There are a select few who will offer Guest Posts but you may have trouble finding these in the usual Google Groups, Forums or Email subscriptions.
5. My final thought on this is, if you are going to the effort of writing content, and your not just some fly-by-night spammer. Then why would you not invest the time to read the website you are posting on, its relatively easy to see if a website is good, read a few of the articles and if you like it, chances are others will, which means traffic will happen.

Answer 1

So to the question of what will my PageRank be at the next update? Firstly ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have lot's of content?
• Is your content good?
• Do you use Social Media well?
• Do you get good traffic?

If you answer Yes to all the above points then you can expect a deserved PageRank. However that doesn't really answer your question does it? So here is some amazingly good stats which will confuse you further

Keyworddatabse did a huge study looking at websites with Page Authority and Page-rank to determine the correlation between the two. Below shows the most likely Page Authority against a PageRank as found by their extensive study.

PageRank 0  = Page Authority 20

PageRank 1  = Page Authority 29

PageRank 2  = Page Authority 46

PageRank 3  = Page Authority 46

PageRank 4  = Page Authority 46

PageRank 5  = Page Authority 46

PageRank 6  = Page Authority 73

PageRank 7  = Page Authority 84

PageRank 8  = Page Authority 89

PageRank 9  = Page Authority 94

PageRank 10  = Page Authority 97

As you can imagine the correlation gets stronger as you move to the higher end of websites, but also does not take into account age of the website. Stats can be useful and this is probably the most useful stat I have found on the subject, but remember nothing is an exact science, as Google say if it was then everyone would have a formula to manipulate their search engine.

You can find their interactive chart here

Answer 2

If you knew the exact date or even month of the next update, I would suggest you go to the bookies and get decent odds betting on your sure thing. In essence nobody knows, people already think it has been too long, and the old adage of being quarterly has been shot to shit. What you can expect is an update that will rock the Net and hammer bad practices just as hard as the last one did.

At the end of the day, your main concern will be whatever the purpose of your website is for. Blog owners are most worried about traffic, so use Google Analytics and figure out what works and what doesn't rather than panic about numbers and rankings. If your a business trying to reach customers then try to capture your audience, don't go for a numbers game you will find conversion rates can be really low. Social media and the like are the best for targeted traffic.

Good luck with it all.