How is putting "PR4 Links for sale" distinguishing yourself from other sales threads? If they were automotive links, why not put that without the PR in the title? Would it yield a different result without "PR _" in the title or anywhere in the thread? Of course pagerank is still meaningful because it drives a ridiculous amount of revenue everyday.
PR is visible, where traffic is not. PR is the "easiest"(not most accurate) way to value a site. That's why people still buying high PR even though it is meaningless and for some people, the reason of buying high PR link is to boost up the pagerank of their site, not for SEPR, that's why a PR 7 is more valuable for them than a pr2 with high traffic that's why page strength sucks too
I think you are being a little generous. If Content = King Then PR = Squire // PR != Royalty (PR does not equal royalty)
I just noticed a semi-related article from Google Webmaster on Link Buying and Selling in general from a thread here at DP: From Google Webmaster Blog: Very interesting.
To start with ya'll are talking about ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) not actual PR. The TBPR is merely a digestable numerical representation of true PR that is updated every so often (TBPR Export) unlike true LIVE PR Second TBPR as a value metric of a site for anything BUT selling text links is already dead... never mind king http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/The-Google-Toolbar-PageRank-Demystified.html and ..there is plenty here on DP as well... such as http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=186449 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=155289&page=3 Well, you get the idea...
IMO, content and page strength is the real king instead of page rank. Page rank is a very basic factor that a buyer look for purchasing, because I think that the page rank can't go higher if you don't follow their webmaster guideline and have other seo things implemented.
If I had the choice between placing on the front page of results for a keyword search or PR6 I'd take the search ranking. PR doesn't get you traffic. I've learnt that from experience.
The way spiders work will never change, they will always determine where to rank a site according to the strength of the links that point to them. Your directory, PR or no PR, will still sell links if it has a good amount of backlinks. The only thing now is, since PR exists, people look at it before bothering to look at the number of backlinks pointing towards a site, and stuff like that.
IMO, content is what helps in getting more PR to certain extent and ofcourse backlinks plays their role as well.
For me "Content is King" rather that PR. Because we build sites to get a unique traffic... So that how can you get traffic if you cannot Satisfy our Targeted Visitors... and Content has a big factor to convert a traffic into sales...
I have to remind you guys that if you have a PR5 website and 1000 backlinks to it, by the next update, even if you dont loose any backlinks, the PR might drop to 4. That is because of the quantity of other websites entering the WWW. You can't have two number 1's and that makes a living As to what I think if PR will vanish... I don't think it will, because basicly its a solution of a complex Google algorithm. Its a solution to determine backlinks quality and quantity. SeoMoz does it one way, Google does it the other way, why would anyone drop a good idea if it works?
Link building can get you far, but it is so much easier to rank well with good content. You need them both. There are way to many paid directories popping up everyday, but not nearly as many made for adsense sites. The downward spiral of adsense and directories will continue, but not disappear. By downward spiral, I'm referring to how adsense has become less profitable every year. People that were rolling it in at the beginning of the program are now dreaming about the old days when they were getting paid more per impression and per click.