wiseguy

It seems like every webmaster worries their head off about the Google PageRank. Some sites will not even exchange links with low PR sites. I really don't get it. From my experience, PR has little to do with a site's position in Google search results. My oldest site ranks in the first position for several of my targeted keywords and phrases, well above competing sites with a much higher PR. In fact, the entire PR system seems severely flawed. Several internal pages of my site have a higher PR than the main page even though the main page has many more and better quality back links. So, can someone explain to me why everyone puts so much importance on the Google PageRank?

stOx

Everything you have said about pagerank is correct. It's effect on SERPS is minimal at best. People worry about it because of two reasons.
1 - They haven't done their research, They say things like "serps are ordered by pagerank" when something as simple as a google search would prove this incorrect
2 - They think that because google have done it and because it has a numerical value that the value must be reprisentative of something important.

As sites sucess should be measured by two things. Visitors and profit.

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kenni

I'm not sure why webmasters worry to much about PageRank other than the excitement of an update (good to see changes of PR ), but as stOx said, it is usually those that do not know much about SEO or haven't done enough research. Also, you might want to take in note that many webmasters exchange/trade links depending on a website's PageRank.

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mpea

Page rank is a small part of the algorithm, as are high quality links, good content, non duplicated content, (word density) meaning density is more important now, optimising for your field (i.e. competing but having something that your competitors don’t have)

some good video clips from matt cutts and his blog (an insider to google):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...25054136856586
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad...ers-will-love/

I would watch all of the videos from this user, It's good advice IMO

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