Macro - 10:42 am on Feb 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

blaze, you give me more credit than I'm due. :) I'm no SEO expert and, in fact, hardly SEO my sites. I very rarely frequent the Google forum (or SEO discussions) here on WW. There are many here who know far, far more than I'll ever do on the subject. And, if you've been following my posts you'd know that I'm not into SEO.

But, yes, I see your point that there could be an agenda behind the "PR doesn't affect rankings" stand. Playing sceptic for a moment - there are some, like fom2001uk has pointed out, who have a career based around PR or whose business relies on selling links. It wouldn't be in their interest to support a theory that PR doesn't affect rankings. Staying in sceptic mode I'm struggling to find a potential benefit anyone is likely to derive from taking the opposite stance.

Hopefully newer members will all learn that there could be a hidden agenda behind almost any post. And, that the only thing they can rely completely on is their own observation. SERPs is a particularly good way of verifying the PR point. Simply do a lot of searches on varied terms in different industries. A little more research on PR may be worth doing before you run those tests on SERPs (you'd need to bear in mind things like the fact that tPR is a representation of a page's PR at the last update whenever that was, and the current tPR could be different). Then draw your own conclusions or, if it's not clear enough for a "conclusion", get your own feel for how much PR matters.

Is it worth discussing whether PR does or doesn't make a difference in SERPs? Sure, all discussion is good and it's definitely worth its own thread. Feel free to link to it from here. This page was done to serve as a quick and simple guide to PR for members newer to WM and to hopefully raise the signal ratio in other threads. It was made in the same spirit as other "info" posts I've made like The basics of Adsense Stats [webmasterworld.com].