Obviously they are not ..but here the question is about PR importance.

The ultimate aim of creating a website is earning money or spreading information..

for bot goals we need that our site should have high traffic (or you can we need top ranking with related keywords)

So i can say that we can side line the PR..

I am not saying that pr is not important..obviously it is ..but it is not everything..you can get desired goal without the pr too

Creating a website is merely one side of this.

How do you rate/trust a website? In theory, would the average person be more inclined to trust a site with a higher PR or a lower PR?

In the real world, would you be more inclined to trust a well known establishment over one that is virtually unheard of?

(Yes, I'm aware that not all inbound links are positive.)

I'm not saying PR is infallible. The algorithms are easily played and far from perfect. No one likes their site sidelined. But is there currently a better alternative? Should there be?

What could be an alternative for PageRank? Back in the mid 90's, I paid subscription for a metasearch engine, Copernic, which yielded results ranked in the order if I clicked it before. Very interesting concept.

People who focus on pagerank are missing the boat. We've got a higher pagerank than several of our competitors, yet they're spanking us in SERPs and traffic. But not for long

With the exception of lovemyseo, everyone seems to be making valid points. I was at a recent event where the concept of creating web content for the user experience rather than the search engines should be the goal. I think that if you are trying to justify your worth to clients, page rank is a metric to do so and you should design towards that goal. However, if you are trying to help your client increase the number of site visitors who return often for the content and whatever value proposition that exists, then you would design for the user experience.

while some swear by the pagerank system, some choose to say there's more to 'it' than just that. overrated? yes.

actually buddy the main issue is what is your primary goal..

most of the visitor does not know so much about the seo and most of them even does not heard about the PR.

So you are asking from a Seo expert point of view...and i am speaking on the behalf of a normal internet user..
he is not well aware with all these technical aspect like PR, alexa ranking and niche...

they just go to the search engine ..type the keywords over there ..and just go through the top result.


So the ultimate game is getting top ranking and traffic not getting pr.

Looking to hear your views

I think having a high pr status in google can make your site a trustworthy and popular your site .

I fully agree. I also agree a primary goal is usually to get traffic.

And whether SEO-conscious or not, links help a site get traffic, and PR is one measure of links.

Even normal users want people to visit their site, no? We're just talking labels. Just because a normal user isn't aware of them, doesn't mean those labels don't exist.

Gathering a volume of useless links in order to acquire higher PR (especially from directory submissions and link exchanges) attracts very few new qualified Internet visitors, what many see as traffic is actually spiders, robots, crawlers and dataminers of all sorts and this can easily appear to be legitimate traffic but it isn't. Crawlers of this nature absolutely love high PR sites because they dig deeply into all the various link suppliers that these webpages rely on for PageRank.

Sure, a knowledgeable webmaster/website owner can easily differentiate between what a qualified visitor is and isn't but most just look at their hit counters, as long as they are spinning through the roof this pleases them for some reason in spite of inquiries for sales or service not increasing.

Personally, I'd rather have one hundred qualified visitors (those that come directly from the SERPs as a result of finding your webpage highly ranked from a keyphrase search) than 50,000 bits of Internet noise.