This is purely based on my personal opinion and whatever little (sarcasm lol) knowledge i have about Google Search engine. Many people here often discuss the relation between Pagerank and SERPS. Some say SERPS has absolutely no relation to PR and others counter attack that claim saying their is some or major relation. In my opinion, 1) PR is ONE of the important factor in SERPS. 2) Those who claim that PR has nothing to do with SERPS sometimes give examples such as "xxx" keyword, PR 4 is ranking higher than PR 7, but those PR are for their homepages not for that particular ranked page. Not in every case, but i have seen people giving such examples. 3) SERPs gives higher importance to backlinks. Now backlinks can analysed into following categories: a) no. of backlinks (of course nofollow not counted) 2) Backlinks related to your content (same niche) 3) Backlinks with exact anchor text 4) Backlinks with weight (more outgoing links on pages linking to you will reduce the weight) 5) Backlinks without reciprocal (gets more weight than reciprocal link) 4) Your Website niche and Keyword density matters. You won't rank for Forex keyword on myspace site unless you cloak the keywords, which is against their terms. Please add your points to this FAQ. I hope it helps everyone on DP.
Totally disagreed! I have seen so many PR0 pages outranked high PR sites or pages. PR is more of gauge of how much confidence Google has in you. It doesn't have much to do with keyword relevancy. Ranking results are much more about relevancy. Given everything equal, it helps to have high PR, but PR isn't the total story - just a small piece of the puzzle.
An important thing to keep in mind when considering PR effect on SERPs is that the PageRank from the toolbar is not the actual ranking Google currently has for the page. It is only a number converted from this actual ranking, which may not even be current. So analyzing the relationship would only give real information right after a PageRank Update/Export, if even then.
If PR is not related to SERPs, then what exactly would its purpose be? I think just the fact that Google has an internal PR that is different from what we see shows that they are actively using it for something.
Both keyword relevancy and PR are important for SERPs. If a site has higher page rank, Google indexes even deep internal pages and indexes them more often(provided content is fresh). This enables you to optimize your site for more keywords and therefore rank higher in SERPs for several queries.
In the last Google update Google actually discounted PR to stop sites with high PR sites selling links