And that means what? Not a thing. I forgot the topic now, but I know that it must have been really interesting. So interesting I really wish that I could remember it, but I can't. Oh... Now I remember; PR... Who cares? No one.
This guy right here... Rocks! He has it right all the way. NOBODY CARES BUT GOOGLE. The rest is a best-guess scenario. Do you trust page rank? How many times have you been offered FAKE PR links? Later on you find out they were spoofed or Google gets a hair up their butt and changes that PR6 to PR2 overnight and you lose you big fat backlink that you paid for. Hasn't happened to you yet? It will. Google does what Google does just to control the Internet. Fear is their best weapon. (And I know I am gonna get spanked for double posting, but *hit happens).
PR is extremely important. It gives you good negotiating power for link exchanges between your site and others It allows you to negotiate for better prices if you wish to sell your site It is a factor when it comes to ranking in SERPS. Sure, a PR2 might be winning against your PR4 ... but maybe their links are more relevant, maybe their site has more age, maybe their on-site SEO is superior. There are other factors at work, yet all other factors exactly the same a PR4 WILL kick the ever-living **** out of a PR2, guaranteed For those that wish to sell links, it is a factor of consideration For those who wish to sell blog posts, it is a factor of consideration For qualifying for many various affiliate and/or partnership ventures, it is a factor of consideration Everyone who complains that PR isn't important ... they have their own method of making money that doesn't involve any of the above, and for this reason they blanket exclaim that PR is unimportant for everyone. But if you want a full set of options for monetizing your website, you'll pay attention to PR.
That what i meant, they would have given away with PR system but as you said Google is still investing significant amounts of money to maintain their patented PageRank, so PR still stands the tallest
PR has some weight, but, just as Jim has pointed out, the degree importance or unimportance of PR is known to google only. However, what is useless is the toolbar PR. The actual PR is a value on the scale of 0 to 1.The fact that it is publicly viewable, by the way, testifies to this. Google will never let you know what genuinely affects rankings and to what degree.
PageRank was quite important, say, 5 years ago. Now it is just one of many factors, and certainly not one of the most important factors IMO.
Google update PR constantly. Tool bar PR is updated every 3 or so months. These are the exact reasons I believe that the toolbar PR will/has become a less and less "reliable" way to tell the true PR of a site. ^^ +Rep Pagerank (not to be confused with the toolbar PR) is the reason Google became the best search engine ever. They will never give it away. Before they changed their name to "Google", they were known as "Backrub", because of the importance they placed on backlinks. Nowadays, its a lot more complex than just counting backlinks, but the basics are still the same. Google determines and assigns a site PR (which can be a combination of BL's, age of site, age of BL's, sites trust, link trust etc etc). A sites PR affects its crawling rate, indexing and ranking. Pagerank is, has and always will be an important factor in determining a page's rank in the index and SERP's. Toolbar PR is a confusing partial snapshot or the real PR and should not be obsessed over or taken seriously. Cheers James
Do tell me one thing? How many of us, consider the page rank before visiting any web page during search? I don't think any one of us not visit a site, only if that site has a PR 0. What is the ultimate goal of a website? I guess it is to get visitors and convert them into your customer, so does PR any way affects the visitors? I will say NO, then how come PR will be the most important factor. PR was a toll for evaluating the value of any web page, but it is not at all the most important factor. If you are looking to sell/purchase links then only you will consider PR as a most important factor.
I have a site which is PR 0 and its number 1 on its keywords. But I have no side yet on the argument "is PR important" lol
PR is not too important any more. The more important is how do you dominate search engine for your targeted keywords. This is all by experience, i have PR 4 website and it get higher traffic than my PR 7 website. It's very easy to get high PR website, i can buy very old domain with good PR cheaply rather than build my website to reach high PR for several months maybe years. You should focus how to dominate search engine for your keywords rather than focus how to increase PR.
PR is not important, the only good use for pagerank is when im (on the very very rare occasion) that i might buy a link. thats the only time its any use. pr is total crap anyway. i have a pr2 sextoys site that ranks top 3 for tons of keywords. but everyone else below me has pr3 and 4, go figure
The site (front page) or a particular page? Cause it migh be a high PR site that just happened to mention the keyword en passant
Pr is useful in linkbuilding thats about it. the whole link juice theory tends to be based predominantly on internal and external links verses traffic and pr. but unless your selling links i wouldn't worry about pr or buying them of course.
The only thing i've found PR good for is getting better quality trades. PR doesn't really relate to rankings, traffic or income