I have noticed recently that PR is basically a non-factor on the popularity nor SERP rank of a webpage. I have seen many, many PR 2 or PR 3 sites rank over PR 5+ websites, and have been those sites more popular. This is not a rela short-time notice, we are talking about seeing this over the span of a year. Even after many PR updates, the PR remains low, yet the visitors are higher and the rank on the SERP's are higher for most targetted keywords. Just figured I'd point this out.
Little reminder: PR is indicator of link quality. Also page has to have proper title, description tag as well as h1 and body to rank well on google. Also think LSI; also think of link text Adobe ranks for "click here", but not even in top 100 for "penis enlargement" despite PR10; old good thing about link text you are - what they say about your
think of it like this: The page rank is calculated based on inboound links to the page. Serp position is also calculated based on inbound links to the page, however the two are calculated in completely different ways so although they are related, one does not necessarily reflect the other.
The quality and relevancy of backlinks is the main factor to rank high in Google. We don't need to have thousands backlinks anymore but quality links. A bit off topic, my directories PR have been changing the all day today, that was quite amusing...
HEHE my point exactly Dave, but for those who make there living at selling PR links. That is what they want and you can tell them all you want it don't matter but they wont believe you. Money Talks People Listen!
PageRank is result of LINKS! PageRank = Value of indexed links pointing to that page; So if you want to rank well you need more PageRank (more pagerank means getting more quality links) and vice versa; And some more food from Matt Cutts blog: “Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank†But the side effect is that supplemental pages usually don't gets refreshed that very ofthen and also gets WAY lesser if any traffic at all... Resolution: Get PageRank or get links! PageRank is good tool to use, as you could go after 500 Pr0 links or get 3-5 PR4 links and have similar results;
When you say that you've seen PR 2 and PR 3 websites rank better than PR 5 sites, do you mean for the search results on Google specifically, or on Yahoo and MSN. *Most of the time* Google search results will be available according to PR. Sometimes, you'll see a low PR internal page of a high PR website making to to the top of the SERPs, and doing better than other PR 4 or PR 5 sites, which makes sense.
This is one great example how google ranks pages. On authority site, with 10x lesser link amount to subpage, google can give high rankings.