internetheaven - 4:42 pm on Mar 12, 2010 (gmt 0)

Okay... let's be clear. PageRank - Important for rankings (i.e. numerical value of link juice)

But that's not clear at all, that's the confusion.

If Pagerank is, as you said, a numerical value of link juice - then it is not important for rankings. We're either talking about Authorative Linking or we're talking about the Green Number - it can't be both.

The Green Number of the Authorative Link is user-side information only.

This has to be one of the most pointless questions I've seen asked as a thread starter. Pagerank is an algorithm for quantifying the authority of a site. It isn't anchor text, it isn't title meta tags ... it's not a ranking point of it's own accord. You cannot increase Pagerank without increasing backlinks so the question "do backlinks still matter" is the real question being asked and any one that says backlinks don't matter is, well, insane.