What is PageRank Good For?

If not for link sale vales, what is PageRank good for? Everyone wants higher PR, but honestly, what does it really do?

I lost a good deal of PR in the recent dumps, and I wasn't happy. I didn't know why I wasn't happy, but I know having something "devalued" is never good.

But, now it is a month plus since my once PR6 home page hit PR3, and all the internal PR4 and PR5 pages hit 0, and I am trying to figure it all out.

What I can see on my site since the drop:

1. Number of pages indexed by Google has gone up @ 48% (from about 46,000 to 68,000). There are only 500 or so new pages in this time span, so Google is just listing more existing pages.
2. Number of daily unique visitors from Google searches are up about 7% (about 200 uniques more). Traffic as a whole is up only about 3% over this same time span.
3. "Top search queries" are hard to estimate, but they are even or slightly up over this time span. All the #1 and top 10 queries I had before are still there.

and finally...

4. Text link value is down. While I could stil be selling text links and making a few hundred a month, I'm not. Links sold when the site had PR were not renewed when the PR dropped (the respective buyers choice). Other offers have been there, and if I were to still sells links the best offers have the value down about 35%.

So. I guess I need a PR education.

What is the true purpose if not to convince people of the value of doing what Google doesn't want them to do?

Anyone have similar experiences with a Google surge despite a PR drop?

 

What I believe has happened has been a fairly substantial deflation of PageRank across much of the "indie/commercial"-driven web, due to the devaluation of a lot of sites that were part of the larger sphere of link traded PR.

The result is that many people, even those who never bought links for their own sites through indirect knock-on effects, have seen their PR drop, but because PR has dropped across a large portion of the web, it hasn't actually had a massive impact on people individually unless they were heavily dependent on bought links.

That's my 2c anyway. Basically, the PR "topography" of the web has been "flattened" by the devaluation of (where detected) cash traded link campaigns.

 

I think that unless you are actually selling PR links, the only other thing that PR is good for is inflating egos.

Apart from those two, there isn't really another use for it.

Alex