This quote is from the article at http://www.google.com/newsletter/librarian/librarian_2005_12/article1.html entitled “How Does Google Collect and Rank Results†by Matt Cutts, December 2005. Some posters on this forum continually state that "Page Rank doesn't matter." In this article, Google's Matt Cutts states unequivocally that, other factors being equal, they "usually" lean to the sites with better Page Rank. That sounds pretty plain to me that Page Rank does matter if you are interested in better SERPs rankings on Google.
Well makes sense, more links to you the higher the serps the higher your page rank. The thing is many people think its the Toolbar PR that matters when its actually the REAL page rank that matters, the one that google updates much more often that the one they let us know every 3-4months.
It matters more on competitive keywords. If you wanna get some hits for something trivial, a search phrase with 4 words, its relatively easy and you dont really need pagerank. But if you want to get hits from google for really highly searched 1 word stuff, you will need to have quality sites with lots of votes for them (links), to appear highly.
i think not only does PR affect serp positioning but also indexed page counts... looks like big daddy (64.233.179.104 ) is going to be counting PR and the age factor for not just ranking but also number of indexed pages... i guess google is starting to limit new sites (scrapers or even legitimate content etc) from getting 1,000's of pages of content indexed even if it is unique .. in order to justify your index page count and presence in google you need links, age and established credibility... i think thats where google is
It will certainly be interesting to see the effect that Big Daddy updates have on the google search engine as a whole. I think it is going to be an exciting period. As for page rank effecting serps. By default it has to, to some degree. I think what others on the forum are trying to say is that it is not the most important factor when trying to rank well. And it is certainly not the be all and end all of SEO. So many got tied up in the "oh no your a PR 3 and I'm a 5, cant associate with you" mentality. Brad