Here's one long running anecdote. I've been operating a self-published book site for over five years. All Chinese content. Some of the books are banned in Ch

Here's one long running anecdote. I've been operating a self-published book site for over five years. All Chinese content. Some of the books are banned in China. Much of the content no China online publisher will touch. Baidu loves my site. Searches are often in the top three results on Baidu. I have no ads and pay Baidu nothing. Don't even help them find my site. Baidu even runs its own book site and gives my site plenty of love. To my knowledge the site has never been blocked by the GFW. Google barely knows I exist even though I follow all their webmaster rules. I'm not sure if its because of low page rank or Google not being great at Chinese content. I suppose my point is page rank isn't the only way to go or at least having a strong reliance on page rank may leave out unique or rare content that isn't marketed (quality inbound links) heavily.