Page ranks means very little to the SE user. IMO it is a gimmick but I guess many companies have similar gimmicks to help their brand
I think page rank is still valuable to people who are interested in selling and buying links from web pages with high page ranks. It's a business, there are many people who will pay big bucks to get a backlink from a web page with a high page rank.
...PR still matter to me, but I value high quality relevant inbound links and good content more better than tool bar PR.
You got that right, but try to sell ad space on your site; first 2 lines from advertiser are about your site PR and organic UV-s.
Ofcourse if I browse a site that has PR 8 or something, I will give it a higher status automaticly, but a PR 4 or 5 is nothing serious anymore! + I don't buy links on PR, only on traffic and relevancy
Facts about PR. PR does not affect SERPs at all. It is simply used as a measure to show visitors how credible and valuable and popular (backlinks) a site is. It is a fact that with just a few backlinks from high pr sites, your site's PR can probably jumped to pr 3 or 4 easily. The ironic thing about PR is 90% of the the general internet users dont care and doesnt know what a PR is. Some might even think it stands for Public Relations =.= Bottomline: PR is used to show the public how valuable, credible, and popular (infomation) a site is. That's what it was built for. Sad thing is, PR can be easily manipulated now..
So Google has been putting measures in place to prevent people from manipulating search engine results, primarily by identifying sites who buy and sell links...What is Google's main countermeasure? Lowering or removing PR of offending sites/pages. If PR has nothing to do with SERPs, why would they protect the SERPs by lowering PR on offending sites? If PR didn't matter, why do they want people to put nofollow links on paid advertisements? How would it protect the SERPs if PR meant nothing? Google doesn't do all this because they don't want people making money, they do it to prevent manipulation of THEIR results. By reducing and removing PR from these sites, the weight of the "vote" is reduced. The authority value of the site is reduced as well. Maybe the "votes" don't count at all, who knows. All I know is that if they are going through all this trouble penalizing people for selling links by reducing PageRank, then it MUST affect the SERPs. And if they are taking it away from you as a penalty, it must be worth something. PR is not everything, but it is not nothing either. Maybe it is just an indicator to let you know when you have done something wrong when they take it away . I tend to think otherwise.
Who cares? That's an irrelevant example. "Cheap mortgage" gets only 19 searches a day, per Wordtracker. Do some research (I've done it). Pick some highly competitive keywords, such as "breaking news" (over 50,000 daily searches) or "real estate" (20,000 daily searches). Google them, then check the PR on Google's first ten results. Here are the results of those two competitive keywords: • "Breaking news" — Not counting the two PR N/A's that showed up, the other eight PRs were PR9, 5, 7, 8, 6, 6, 6, 7. • "Real estate" — The top ten were PR7, 8, 6, 7, 7, 5, 7, 7, 8, 4. What's my point? Simply this: Forums abound with posts about unnamed PR1 and PR2 pages outranking high-PR pages. So what! I ranked #1 for my first and last name from the time my website was first cached! Any low PR page can rank high for a noncompetitive keyword. Do your own research. I've checked other keywords, too. You'll find that for highly competitive keywords, as in the examples above, low-PR pages outranking high-PR pages are as scarce as hen's teeth. So when posters give the anecdotal stories about low-PR pages outranking high-PR pages, I would appreciate hearing what the keyword is. Because if it's a low-competition keyword, the ranking means very little and proves nothing about the ranking value of PR (or the lack thereof).
PR is more of a psychological thing, and because of this it still plays a big part when it comes to the value of the site. But in some ways it is still important depending on the type of business you have.
If I had to guess, it's probably because, as a professional webmaster, you've continued to do some good on-page SEO. Just a guess.