Google does hand jobs when they decide to block PR. I first read about it here Forbes.com Gets a Handjob?
What are you basing this assumption on? Any reality? I don't recall hearing him say anything like that.
Stox: Here's a couple of quotes [below] from Matt Cutts with the urls. You can also check on google for sites can lose their ability to give page rank Its not an automatic penalty as I understand it. The penalty is applied by a handjob. "Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)." http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/[/url "Remember that just because a site shows up for a "link:" command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext." http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/08/search_engine_s_2.html
PageRank does have an effect on SERP. But SERP does not deend n PageRank entirely. I have been reinforcing this in DP but gets tired when people still says 'high PR == good SERP'... And bogart is right on the selling links for manipulative purposes part
From my unscientific observations, I believe Page Rank is the criteria used for frequency of crawling, not SERP ranking.
Haven't heard of PageRank 3.7 before. As I've said all my statement are based on my experience and observation. And I don't make statement out of SEO articles or discussion, unless I'm missing something here from http://www.google.com/technology/ PageRank is something we should look for when acquiring links to our site. But as I've said not all the times. You must learn how to get a quality links for your site. You can do these by checking the link popularity of the site. PageRank is quite synonymous to link popularity. Not sure on what others are claiming here. But based on my experience, I've managed to help lot of client sites rank high in SERPs, the most recent was a 1 word keyword with 61,200,000 competition and I'm not here to argue with SEO wannabe here. I just want to give advice based on my experience.
pagerank is based on the amount of links (regardless of wether it's on topic or not). Pages with high pagerank in turn pass more pagerank on other pages than low-pagerank pages do. Pages selling links risk loosing the ability to pass pagerank to other pages. That's pagerank. The other issue is the serps. Pagerank does influence the serps, but on topic links can easily help a page go higher in the serps - when a site that has lower pagerank actually has more relevant on topic links.
Thats interesting bogart, I hadn't seen that before. that's because we only see toolbar PR of 1-10. Internal (real PR) is a floating point number and it changes constantly. This is why TBPR updates are meaningless to most people. If you get PR6 on the TBPR update this could mean you had a real PR of between 5.6 and 6.4 a month ago.
It might have been the original idea but right now I doubt it has any effect at all and for that the thanks to the wide boys who have contributed so much for this industry. A pox on them and the the belief that easy money at any price is a worthy calling.