Pagerank or Link Pop

[whatson]

When it comes to Google and link popularity, do you only have to be concerned with pagerank? For instance which site would rank higher for 2 identical sites, and one has a PR 5, but 200 backward links, and the other has PR 6 but only 20 backwards links?

[lazerzubb]

I would guess that the site with 200 inbound links would rank higher, this is since Google places a lot of weight on Inbound Anchor text, and it seems like they are placing less and less weight on PageRank.

There is a lot of research documents on PageRank, my advise would be to check out the SEM research Topics forum here at WebmasterWorld, were a lot of them have been discussed.

And my tip is to focus less on PageRank and more on content, and conversions and getting good inbound links with a good anchor text.
A good start is:
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]