I was watching the last webmaster video by Matt Cutts on youtube on Advertorials and native advertising and I am surprised how much google is fighting against sites who use paid advertorials because of the thing they call Page rank passing links. When in the other hand Google have been saying at least for the last couple of years that page rank is not that important, they still don't want anyone to have links that pass page rank. If page rank is not that important why google don't want anyone to buy/have links that pass page rank. or is it that google is lying and page rank is the most significant metric that they use on ranking websites.
Mac, I've had similar suspicions to those you stated. If PR is not very important — as Google seems to want us to believe — they sure go all out to prevent paid links from passing PR. Why, if PR is only minimally important?
Agreed with you 100%, If PR is not important than they should simply phase it out. Why are they updating PR till now? I think PR is important and it plays some role in ranking.
PR is important. It's just one of the many factors, but still an important one. Currently, there is an entire industry built around the PR, and I doubt G would dare to remove it soon. But unfortunately, in a long-term they want to.
I think Google just keep on changing it's strategies and in this matter I am also getting suspicions if page rank is not important then why Google has to say this ?
PR is important of course, Google just wants to blind everybody.. Don't trust every word they tell.. Worry about your PR, cause PR shows a lot of things about your site..
Google obsessively points out that PageRank is only one of 200 (or more) signals in the ranking algorithm. And most website owners completely misread and misinterpret that and wrongly conclude that PR is only 1/200 (or 1/2 of one percent) of the ranking algorithm. My take? Google implies that with their only-one-of-200 factors statement. But, in real life, it may be a very big factor among those 200. To exaggerate (please note: I'm deliberately exaggerating) to make the point — PR could be 50% of the algorithm and all the other factors combined could be the other 50%. Do I believe that? No. Do I believe PR carries only 1/200 of the ranking weight? Again, no. I suspect it's somewhere in between. My personal opinion is that it is the biggest single ranking factor, or why else would Google be working so obsessively to penalize the securing of paid links that pass PR?
Matt Cutts must be the biggest money maker for AdWords, since he joined. Through his efforts, Google raised ad revenue significantly.
Page rank still have important value and Mac is right google is lying or may be it rumors from google that It is not consider Page rank. According to my experience page rank still work.