I am also of the same opinion to be honest, there is way to much hype about PR and it actually means very little. SERPs, traffic and conversion rates are whats important not PR, its only value is if you are selling the domain or selling links but even then PR is very limited in how much it matters in these cases and often other more important factors are overlooked.
Even purchasing links on domains with high PRs is not that important. People purchase those link spaces because they want their PR to go up and it doesn't even matter.
PR is nothing. I have had sites go up and down but the traffic does not. PR is just to show the importance of the page.
The "PR is useless" chant is the dominant one on Digital Point. I'm planning to join the crowd as soon as Google stops spending all that money, time, engineer salaries, and hardware on computing PageRank. What's wrong with Google?!! Don't they understand that "PR is useless"? Or maybe ... not. Let's see ... two conflicting scenarios: • DPers crying, "PR is useless". • Google spending tons of money to back up their statement that "PageRank reflects our [Google's] view of the importance of web pages". Hmm, which one to believe? DPers? or Google, which is, as the old saying goes, putting their money where mouth is? Edit: to add the relevant hyperlink — http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
Well if Google is spending tons of money on improving the technology behind Pagerank, than that money is not well spent money. Just look at the examples that people showed in this thread. I know tons of similar "exciting" stories about Pagerank. PS.: I don't think anybody cried because of PR, it's just frustrating that every newbie starts a thread about his site that gone from PR 0 to PR 2. So what? Who cares? I'm sure many DP members have sites that went from PR 3 to PR 5 and still, they didn't start a thread for it. Oh and there's another group too, the newbies who's site's PR went down from PR 2 to PR 0. Honestly, who the f*ck cares? What do they expect when they start a thread like that? I think everybody should concentrate on building unique content, and getting quality backlinks to his site to get his site to the first page of the serps and make money from the visitors that come from the serps.
lol, that is too funny. Pagerank reflects the importance of a webpage, really? Then how come Google gave me PR6 on an autoblog I run that maybe gets 10 visitors a month and provides nothing of value to the Internet whatsoever. I put this autoblog up so my domain didn't just sit there dormant, and now I have PR6. Trust me, this page is not that important, yet Google decided to give me PR6. It makes no money, gets no traffic, and has no valuable information whatsoever. You also left out the part where they say the Pagerank Algorithm is only 1 out of 200 signals they use to figure out a pages importance. So yeah, it plays virtually no role in ranking. My main sites are ranking just fine with low PRs. EDIT:This is directly from Matt Cutts blog "the toolbar PageRank display is not linear. It’s more than twice as hard to get a PR6 compared to a PR3, for example.". So with that logic my crappy autoblog is more than twice as good as a PR3. Highly unlikely.
I couldn't care less about posters' anecdotal stories about how their PR1 page outranks someone else's PR5 page. Or how they got PRX with only XYZ amount of links. There are so many other variables out there in rankings that the anecdotal stories are meaningless without knowing all the details. Concerning PR, the money trail still talks. When Google stops spending so much on it, then I'll ignore it. Not until then.
How does PR make money for you? Do you sell links? If you sell links, then it's against Google's rules. No offense but you act like PR has a really important role in your online business.
and how do you know how much money they spend on it? do you work there and have inside access? I would love to see this so called "money trail".
How much money does PR make for me? The answer is simple (and no offense taken) My site (sig link #1) is entirely nonprofit. I pay for it out of my own money and offer it to the internet as a public service for any who might be interested. So I have zero financial interest in PR. I have nothing for sale on the site. And I ask for and receive no money.
Many people don't know what pagerank is and many don't know how to find out what a sites pagerank is anyways.
I find it interesting that people who say "pr doesn't matter" often have no or little pr for their sites. If pr doesn't matter at all, then how about some of you guys with a pr0 or pr1 try to outrank those high pr sites for the keyword "travel" Pr does matter for rankings, but that is not saying it is everything. Pagerank also update behind the scenes constantly and is one of several factors google use to rank a site.
But there are so many ways that PR is being cheated nowadays and since nobody except Google really knows how it work, it can't be relied upon too much. Google is thinking they are playing God by telling us to pay attention to our sites pageranks based upon "blind faith" and having no idea exactly how pagerank works.
Source: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html Yes, PR matters. The problem is what is in the toolbar is a generalized rank of the site. I believe PR is assigned on a keyword/page basis. Lacking any other form of quickly quantifying a page's health, PR does matter to me.
As they control Knol too, that outranked Business.com, an authority site and they outranked it with the exact same copy of one of Business.com's article on a Knol page.
I think depend on what the webmaster concern, if selling a link then PR will be the main subject, otherwise if building backlink for SERP will be concern for traffic.