Dear buddy! I am very confused on here and I got failed to answer when my friend ask me this question. Lots of webmasters (almost everybody) want to make a link exchange with only those sites which have a good PR. If PR has not any advantage and not affect on Search Engine Result Page, why we need PR? Please friends, I need exact answer for it. I too notice on it, when I search on Google "Search Engine" and get some results - 1st = AltaVista (PR 8) 2nd = dogpile.com (PR 7) 3rd = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine (PR7) 4th = search.yahoo.com (PR 8) 5th = searchengineshowdown.com (PR 7) 6th = tsep.info/cms/ (PR 6) From the above result, search.yahoo.com has higher PR than dogpile.com and wikipedia.org. But the search.yahoo.com is listed bellow from dogpile and wikipedia.org. So, is it really I can consider that PR is not affecting on SEPR. If really it's not necessary or has no related with RP, why we're trying to get good Page Rank? Please tell me why RP is required. Thanks
Take it this way. A site that has higher PR is more important because that site is trusted by Google. How? Because of sheer number of sites (more votes) linking to the high Pr site and that makes Google trust the site a bit more than other sites. So it's better to have sites with Google's trust point towards your site BUT relevancy plays a major factor too. Say your site is about insurance yet you have a link on a site that sells shoes is not going to do a lot for you. I try to work around and find a balance. I don't really care about high pr as long as there is SOME PR and as long as the site is related to my site and I believe Google must also care about it a lot!
Pagerank is a "secondary" factor when it comes to search results, considering google uses backlinks as one of the factors in search results it's hard to say Pagerank is useless. Pagerank is used to give value to a backlink to your site, but as we can view in search results a lower Pagerank web page can out rank a higher Pagerank web page for the same keyword term or phrase. This means that Pagerank's role is strictly to give value to links and not to influence search results directly.
PageRank is as important as everything else, with higher PR, you will get more traffic. How? Because PR is based on the number of QUALITY backlinks and some other unique factors which we don't know and probably shouldn't care about if you are a genuine webmaster who cares about visitors and not only money. When you get quality backlinks, your sites get exposure, people sees your link and comes to your site and in the same time those quality backlinks get you PR!, of course with other things being constant. Those who say PR don't effect rankings usually mean it doesn't effect rankings DIRECTLY, but indirectly it effects everything. If the web is like a human being then PR is heart of it. Without the heart you cant walk now can you? But does the heart makes you walk alone? No! The heart acts as the central point of all the functions. Google can be classified as the brain which assesses everything with the aid of the proteins/vitamins/minerals pumping and oozing out by the blood when it is flushed out lol. ;-) by the heart itself.
I dont think its as straight forward as backlinks == more pr and more pr == better serps. or any other way you choose to see it. Only reason I say that is that I have site which is PR5 and has 2 backlinks only. Its an authority site in that it has those sublinks under its name when you search its domain and before you ask if the sites that backlink me are high PR, well I will say that both of them are lower than PR5. (PR3+PR4) I like to look at things separately if you have good pr, you are trusted, if you have good serps doesnt mean you're necessarily trusted but you're up in the rankings. I think pr just gives a rough indication of trustworthiness and thats all. In tems of revenue we all know that SERP rankings are what counts. Anyway Im off for some dinner.
Agreed of what you mentioned here... Although PR seem useless nowadays, but without backlinks your site will become an "empty shack" that have low traffic or not even one...
SERP is not completely dependent on backlinks but there are other SEO techniques too But PR is directly dependent on backlinks. So, SERP proportional to some extent on PR but not completely
The real thing that matters is the search results ranking. You can see that, lower PR pages out rank high PR pages. Just concentrate on building backlinks, this will improve your search results ranking + you will also get a good PR.