After reading quite a bit on page rank, I think it is irrelevant to where you place on a search engine's page. Of course, there is some relation, because your search engine page ranking is based partially on quality external backlinks and those links help page rank as well. However, that relation is weak and so let's assume that page rank has little to nothing to do with where you end up on SE pages and therefore little to do with your site's traffic. Assuming that's true, are there other reasons that I care about page rank? The only answer that I have is that it can be important for ads later. Or is it even important for that? Wouldn't ads be more interested in your Alexa ranking and other similar things? So my bottom line question is this: why are many people around here so concerned about page rank? If you go to the link building forum, for example, that's an extremely common topic. What's the big push??
That's what I was looking for! Thx for the response. But now here's my question: why would someone care? What if I had a decent alexa ranking or they looked at my traffic and the numbers look good? Wouldn't somebody want a site with good traffic much more than a high PR?
Of course advertisers will look at your alexa ranking but they will most probably look at your PR status as well. Alexa ranking is a system that can be cheated easily, for this reason, PR status gives more weight to your site. We must remember that getting a higher PR is more difficult that getting a High Alexa rank, the reason is obvious, google is more stricter with their guidelines than Alexa. just my two cents opinion
I agree with you, the whole package is important. I've paid more for high-traffic links than high-pr links. PR is strictly a google factor. The other SEs probably don't know what your PR is, they surely don't care. Except possibly as a way to imitate google's algorithm. But it's one of those things where there's a whole 'flock of chirping birds' crying "PR, PR, PR" all the time, and it's a google thing, so people think it's great and important. You get higher PR links and such to raise your own PR in order to (hopefully) raise your position in the google SERPS. That's all it is, but it has become this holy grail becuase for people who really don't know how to make use of the metrics of a website, because it allows them to see that they are doing something right. This seems to have encouraged a sort of ideal that pagerank is directly proportional to traffic among some, which most people realize is not true at all. That's how it seems to me. Pagerank is probably more important if your revenue stream is adsense publishing than anywhere else. Since it's an indication of favor in google's network it should help your CPC and ad quality, I think. just IMO
The importance of page ranks knows only the link builders, the advertisers, the link buyers and link sellers.
its just another yardstick to guage how effective your link building efforts have been or how stong a certain website is. i've seen many times a new article put on a high PR site will produce better results in the serps then a similar article on a site with low PR. obviously there are other factors involved, but i have seen this several times.
I'm not sure how, but I've heard you can get penalized for selling backlinks. Again, I don't know how Goo and others could tell, but that's what some pointy headed people tell me...