No, Page Rank is very important.
It gets the webmaster Bragging rights for sure ;)

If page rank is not important why are you still sulking, face the truth you would love to be a pr7 once again.

Page rank should be taken away. The only reason why it still exists today is because people would flip out if it was gone. Its not an up to date showcase on how your page is doing. I personally would be concerned with my bottom line (IE: Traffic, conversions) than what a green bar has to say.

What would happen to DP... hehehe

Actually, Peter, I was talking about a completely different site. Barry and I don't care that SERoundtable is a PR4.

PR had always been an issue but why concentrate on it? Google is not the only existing major search engine there's still Yahoo and MSN... PR is only a thing about Google, it's their way of indicating a site's credibility... it has always been a game for webmasters, because if you were able to have a high PR it means you were able to satisfy Google enough.. now the question will be were you able to do the same thing for the other search engines?

One of my sites fell from a PR2 to a PR0...not done much link building...anyway it had 44,000 uniques in December last year...

Another tedious article with a headline that claims PageRank 'means nothing' only for the content of the actual article to make the entirely banal point that PageRank is not all-important.

PageRank does not mean nothing. Toolbar PageRank means nothing. There is a huge, huge difference.

Recently I did consulting work for the leading web analytics company, one of their clients was a large computer company (I won't say their name but it rhymes with hell). Their biggest concern for an SEO strategy was how to increase their little green bar. Some people just don't get it.

Jacob
www.jmorganmarketing.com

We have many sites that lost PageRank and they have not lost visitors.

For years we have been teaching our clients about SEO and the value of PR. Now we have to tell them that everything we told them is not true.

Well....

Page rank is important which is why we are debating it yet again. A lot of so called seo/web marketing experts had their pr slashed as they were not applying the rules of their own industry. Experts! I am glad their not doctors working in my local hospital.

Having a high page rank site shows the public that you are a trusted site in the eyes of Google - a powerful vote indeed.

What percentage of "the public" actually have Page Rank displayed in their browser? It is mostly SEOs who use it IMO...

Let's settle this for once and all. PR matters to webmasters, but it doesn't matter to visitors. Who gives you money from your site?

Also we have toolbar pagerank, and actual pagerank. Toolbar is useless, and actual PR serves an internal purpose at Google that we little ol' webmasters shouldn't worry our pretty little heads over. Otherwise, we would see that live PR total.

Point Being: screw pagerank. Focus on user experience and conversions. Bottom line.

Most of the online world equates the quality of a website to the pagerank number. An average person will make an unconscious judgement of you or your web property based on the PR.

lol not this again. when will everyone figure it out... oh thats right, never!

A year ago, James Brausch wrote this on his blog:
"I don’t look at Google PageRank at all. First of all it’s only available for Google and I look at all three search engines the same way… so it’s ruled out as a metric for just that reason.

Secondly, it is a very gross metric. There is no specificity. It is a number from 0 to 10. That number is assigned to the entire page. It has no specificity for a specific keyword. So, it’s just plain not useful for anything.

Finally, Google controls it and purposefully introduces error into the reported number. So not only it is a massively broad measurement (0 to 10 with no keyword specificity), but it is purposefully erroneous."

Saying PageRank doesn't matter is ignorant and only shows what a SEO neophyte you area.

PageRank is just Google proprietary link popularity algorith. So you're saying link popularity doesn't matter. It may be trendy to say it doesn't matter, like some pathetic Goth kid in a highschool somewhere whining about all the conformists, but it isn't quite true.

Now you can say Toolbar PR as an indicator has questionable value because in the best case scenario it is only a partial read that is 3 months old, but to say PageRank in general is meaningless just makes you look dumb.

I'll also point out that whomever James Brausch is in the previous comment is equally ignorant. Google does not assign values from 1-10 for ranking purposes. That is purely for toolbar visual representation. Every page does indeed have an actual weight associated with it, one that isn't rounded off on a one to ten scale.

The fact is, PageRank hasn't really changed much since Google created it, only perception has changed. The same ignorant people who now say PageRank is meaningless, are those who a few years ago had the equally ignorant position that PageRank was the only thing that matters. It is a kneejerk reaction to finding out they're wrong. They go from one extreme to another. The fact is PageRank hasn't changed much, it was always just one factor, it still is just one factor.

(and yes, I'm talking about actual PageRank here, I shouldn't have to preface the word "PageRank" with "actual" every time I use it, but apparently too many people think actual PageRank is what you see in the toolbar, it isn't. The toolbar is a purposefully stale, purposefully partial, and purposefully imprecise indicator. It is not the actual value of what is used in the algorithm.)

http://www.websitepublisher.net/blog/2006/11/17/pagerank-an-essay/

More 'pagewank' again ;-). I think Matt pointed out a little while ago that the PageRank numbers should be ignored, and definitely the numbers in the green bar are not a true reflection of a sites or pages value. I much prefer overall mindshare within a sector as a value metric.

Has anyone looked at how Google defines it?

PageRank

A Google feature that helps determine the rank of a site in our search results. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your searches.

I have to agree with Lisa Barone on this one. While Toolbar PR doesn't matter, the PR that Google actually uses (which rarely, if ever, matches the Toolbar PR) absolutely matters.

Sorry, just catching up on this. The title should have been Google Toolbar PageRank... In any event, it does give sites a stature. I honestly did not loose traffic here at the Search Engine Roundtable nor did I loose advertising income, it actually is more then ever on both fronts.

Like I said many times. I agree with Google's move on this. It is a great way to discourage the sale of links for PageRank.

i am a newbie in seo subject.

i think your PR is a temporary thing. in the beginning you need to get it to be found from search results.

but after a while your direct traffic can be enough. when you don't need search engine traffic too much you don't care PR

Pagerank means nothing... I have 2 relatively new sites up online (6 months old at max) - one is PR1 and the other is PR0.

Both are performing well in google, yahoo & msn. In fact one of them went down from a PR2 to PR1 recently and is still no.1 in google for several resonably competative keyphrases. In fact over the last few months the performance on several other keyphrases has improved, nothing has gone down.