I was a firm believer that PR was the end-all, be-all of getting good organic traffic. Then all these posts show up by reputable members saying PR doesn't mean anything. So this is what I did...I started Googling random terms and phrases and seeing if the #1-5 results were necessarily higher PR than the rest of the list. And you know what, almost every single time the first couple of results were <= PR4, and the pages after them were higher, including a couple of PR6s. So yes I still believe PR matters, because it is a prominent feature on the Google Toolbar, but it has no where near the importance that I used to place on it. However, it cannot be denied that pages with higher PR do get indexed more often and deeper than lesser PR pages. But for the actual search results, it doesn't have as big an impact as I once believed. My 2 centavos.
Explain to me why you call them reputable members, when you waste time on doing some dumb research trying to prove the opposite.
Of course not, but questioning someone for a good purpose is useful, what you do is completely wasting your time with all this PR nonsense. But hey, you're not the only one, 50% of the threads is about it, but then again these same people don't make a dime because they believe that success depends on PR instead of hard work.
visible pr is one thing, real pr is another current rankings is one thing, future rankings, another buying links based on pr is one thing, real value of links is another etc.
Whenever I do a check to see who's at the top for something it seems to be the ugly sites with the worst keyword stuffing winning the game.
MrX No there's nothing wrong at all in doing your own research, I do the same. Trust but verify. When you were doing your research, did you notice if the low PR sites that came first usually had the keywords in the domain name? I have a suspicion that the domain name is much more important than is usually recognised, especially for sites less than a couple of years old.
I've known this for a long time. It has been my observation that less obvious factors such as the age of the domain play a much larger role than PR. All things being equal, PR probably does play a role.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn! PR is not the value you see when you look at your toolbar . yaaaaaaaaaawn again PR is a real-time component. Go ahead and remove your toolbar, you will understand it better without it.
I'll explain why PR doesn't affect serps (directly). If you have 10,000 links pointing to your site with the anchor text "dookie"... how is that supposed to help you rank for "loans"? Even if the site has a PR7... that doesn't mean it's going to rank for terms that aren't in the anchor text links.
If two sites have simliar keyword weight/optimization, the one with pagerank will win. But pagerank alone cannot insure good positioning.
Agreed, PR is only one contributing factor to search result placements. I have a PR5 site that displays in the top 5 for a ton of popular site related terms, yet have several PR6 sites that don't get in the top 10 for any popular site related terms. PR is just one part of the equation, it's important (some believe) but it's not the end all be all.