Is PR even relevant anymore or is it just a joke? Maybe I just don't have a correct understanding of the value of a high PR and it's usefulness to the web... I've heard many people say that PR doesn't mean a thing and I finally feel the same way.. I just made a new site and it's a PR 4 while my old site is a PR 2. The PR 2 site has much better placement than the PR 4 site. Anybody else experiencing the same thing.. When is google going to scratch this, or have they already?
It probably has some sort of bearing at one point or another in their algo/calculations. But who the heck knows these days. All I can say for myself is after linking up with a few pr5 and pr6 sites, a few days later I was seeing results for certain key phrases out of nowhere and even higher than my own site.
Googles TBPR updates have been a joke but PR still matters. If you sell links then it matters, people still check PR before buying links. (Not all, but most) PR is still (as far as I know) a part of the Google algo and even if that part is minscule it still matters.
Really, this is the primary reason PR matters. As Roman says, when advertisers are deciding to whether or not to advertise on my site they almost always look at the PR of my pages. I'm sure that if my chemistry site didn't have so many PR6 primary pages and PR5 secondary pages, some of my advertisers wouldn't have had much interest in my site. Does PR have a major impact on SERPs? I don't think it does, but people still use it when evaluating the value of buying links/ad on other people's sites.
PR only matters if buying/selling links or acquiring link partners since some websites will only exchange links with sites that have a certain PR. Other than that, I really don't see the importance of PR, it certainly has very little to no effect on rankings, sales, conversions, traffic, etc.
EXACTLY ... That's the best quote I could find about PR and I would put it in a BIG text in every new thread in DP about PR.
PR is important when determining how deep and often to crawl and index sites, there's no doubt about that. Other than that, it's good for buying / selling links and that's pretty much all (like already posted). PR is not an indicator of traffic in any way shape or form, but it is still important to Google. ***note*** I shall say that PR isn't what's important, it's the backlinks. PR is just (or supposed to be) an indicator of the quantity / quality of backlinks. But, with the recent quirkyness of the PR toolbar exports... I now use MSN to determine backlinks instead of relying on the toolbar.
The idea is that it give the user a quick way to see the relative popularity of a page in comparison to similar pages. From a user's perspective this could be useful. How much does PR matter to the SERPs? Only Google really knows.
Probably to confuse people. If people think PR matters and affects rankings they'll spend more time actually writting unique content and playing by all the rules instead of generating 5 billion spam pages
This is a misconception. Please tell this to the one who said it and do not attempt to spread this idea.
PR should be considered as a result, rather than as the cause of things these days. People, especially newbies often think that having a high PR page will help them gain better SERPs. And they go around, looking for link partners, building links, etc. Eventually, they SERPs will improve (assuming that they've gained a lot of back links and that they have done it in the right way), PR will also improve (assuming that some of the back links will transfer some of its PR to them), and that's where the "PR effects SERPs" urban legend comes from. PR is just a result, a side measure of various things, and not a cause of high SERPs.