I see again and again posts on Digital Point that say, "PR is not important." I always find that puzzling, because I subscribe to the economic theory of "following the money trail". Google continues to spend large sums (hardware, staffing, designing updated algorithms, etc.) to compute Page Rank. That to me is de facto evidence that PR is important to Google! Otherwise, why would they spend tons of money giving us PR? As long as Google continues to publish Page Rank, I'll hold to the "money trail" approach and conclude that PR is important to Google. Therefore, it will be important to me.
Sure, Pagerank is important to Google, but that doesn't mean it needs to be important to us as webmasters. In the end, it's still a measurement tool provided by a single company. Yahoo! doesn't use it, MSN doesn't use it, Ask doesn't use it, only Google does. It's one company, so you still need to look at every aspect of rankings for all search engines.
if you're not into selling links or websites, i would say that you shouldn't be too bothered about toolbar pagerank - you'd be more interested in serps and traffic. if you are into selling links and websites, toolbar pagerank is ALL-IMPORTANT! no matter what others say, people still look into it when making decisions...
I sell links and SEO and for me PR is very important, however serach engine positions are even more important both for me and anyone else who has a business website. My site is only 3 months old and I have only received a PR of 2 however my search engine positions are very good on Google and especially MSN, I receive around about 150 - 200 unique visitors a day and I get alot of business from my website. These things are more important then PR.
Yes, but a single company that sends me thousands of unique visitors every month, regardless of what MSN and Yahoo do. That continues to keep me focused on anything related to Google that will increase my site's effectiveness. And Google's extensive investment into Page Rank is not to be ignored, unless we subscribe to the naive notion that PR is unimportant to Google. Agreed. But it's not an "either/or". I spend lots of time on white-hat SEO, to increase SERPs. AND I spend lots of time on link-building to increase PR. I think that a savvy webmaster does both.
Google says otherwise, at http://www.google.com/technology/ "The heart of our software is PageRankâ„¢ ... PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.... Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search."
PR is definitely important. The lower your PageRank, the farther away from the first page of Google Search your site will show up.
PR is very important to the site that the page is linked to . Getting a link from a PR9 site will help SERPs .
I'm not quite sure about this. My site PR raised up in this update from 4 - 5 and serps up from #52-55 to #18-20 in my niched competitives keyword. It happened at the same time so I think it may be related between them PS. I never see a site with PR0 ranked top 10 in major SE's with high-competitives keyword.
I think it matters when 90% of internet users use Google over other SEs. I'd rather have a site indexed by Google and not by 100 other SEs, than visa versa.
PR matters simply because it still matters to a lot of people. Whether or not PR really plays a role in SERPs is really not important from this standpoint. There is a whole economy (i.e. link buying & selling) built around the idea of PR. Google may or may not anticipated this. If they do away with PR, someone else will adopt it and will receive a huge following from webmasters like you and me.
No matter how not important PageRank is, you will still be excited when PageRank is updating. You might say PageRank is not important, but you do bother to check if your site's PageRank did increase or not when PageRank is updating. So, ask yourself.
I think that PR is important to my ego. I'm always trying to up my PR, which in turn only helps improve my sites...I hope.
That's just toolbar PR, Google has your current PR on record and it's updated all the time. Having said that, since Google sends 80+% of all SE traffic the if Google says PR factors into ranking then it is important.
Good point. Because few webmasters/seo look for PR before exchanging links. PR is for trust rank only not for SERP.
SERP: Short for search engine results page, the Web page that a search engine returns with the results of its search. The major search engines typically display three kinds of listings on their SERPs. Listings that have been indexed by the search engine’s spider, listings that have been indexed into the search engine’s directory by a human, and listings that are paid to be listed by the search engine. From Google: PageRank Explained PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query. According to Google it is so I think I'll take their word for it.