PR as in Public Relations - Love it! PR as in Press Releases - Love them too! PR as in PageRank - Google tool to keep webmasters distracted - not so fond of it.
Are you saying that Google invests all that time, money, and engineering time into PR calculations "for only fun"? I still subscribe to the ages-old dictum: Follow the money trail.
Using your own thoughts, Since PR and the organic SERPs earn Google no revenues whatsoever.... start with Adwords. The SERPs are a needed expense so that Google can earn money with Adwords.
Because of PR, too many site owners will only trade links if it's on a high PR page that to me is just silly, if you want a successful site, swap links with site owners who can send you traffic- Much much more important If you want to trade PM me
Well, I think the majority of this forum will value PR, because if they didn't, we wouldn't pay thousands and thousands of dollars just to increase our PR.
Yes, from a sales perspective. People pay more for high PR sites. Maybe they consider it proof of quality, I don't know. Personally, it's all about SERPS but then again, they're connected.
When I see my PR go up, I'm happy about it. However, I find that PR plays little in search engine rankings, and is really only important with selling links and site/domain value.
Like I've indicated before... http://www.mdvaden.com/tower_of_google.shtml I don't really value PR. As far as I'm concerned, it follows my content, not my content following it. Its not Google's job to direct my site content. That's my job. Google's job is to figure out how to get my content and your content to searchers in an appropriate fashion.
See everyone gets so caught up in the way it's supposed to be, that they forget to take a step back and look at the situation Ok why does everyone pay thousands and spend so much time getting links to get a good page rank? Answer, so google will move them up to the top for their Key Words, and ultimately you get traffic. Swap links for traffic, and you only need a few good links, and all of a sudden, you are in the same vote- Receiving Traffic Daily Only with a lot less work PR page rank PR page rank, need page rank, can't place your link you don't have a higher enough page rank etc etc etc it's ridiculous