Do you think that page rank is that important any more? I find that ranking high in search engine results is more important. Although one still needs a decent PR to rank high in search engines.
PR is just based on the number of backlinks..PR is how google ranks you.
So the higher PR you ahve the better you will do in google se results.
PR is very important but not the way people use it, people sell sites and advertising based on PR but its really what PR stands for, how high the site ranks in google.
If you get links from high PR sites it will help your own rankings in search engines because google weights backlinks from bigger sites a lot more than smaller sites (Same as bigger PR than smaller PR).
PR is worthless just for getting PR itself and not backlinks though, I never go by PR because you could get PR6-7 just by getting a few links from very high PR sites.
PR doesn't effect your rankings on serps. It is just number that shows popularity of your domain.
Actually it just shows the popularity of one particular page as each each page has its own PR. Home pages for websites tend to have the highest PR in a website simply because they tend to have the most links pointing to them. But this sin't always the case. There are a lot of websites that have excellent subpages that receive a lot more links to them then the website home page. As a result they have a much higher PR then the home page.
PR is a greay concept, but as everyone else said MSN and Yahoo! and other search engines will be emerging with a way to outweight the market of Google, I think in the coming years PR will be a standard thing possibly controlled by multiple companies.
PR is good when you trying to monetize your site to other webmasters. But organic traffic is better than PR. I used to have site that has PR3 with 10,000 unique per day. So PR is nothing to do with traffics but it helps. PR value dropped so much than last 2-3 years.
PageRank is a system developed by Google to give a value to a website which determines where it gets listed in search results. The higher the value (0-10), the higher your site is listed.
There are actually two parts to the beneficial use of the PR system. The first is the PR value itself, the second is the keywords used to establish that value. For example, if you're aiming for high rankings for the term "webmaster site", you'd want as many links to your site using that text. When Google sees these links, it notes the relevance to your site and will increase your search rankings accordingly for those words. To obtain a high ranking, it's generally wise to use one set of keywords for all incoming links when possible.