What are the benefits of high PR?

[sandpetra]

There has been a few threads on PR recently and it seems to me most people (thankfully) now accept PR is not traffic, nor is it high ranking, not in itself anyway.

When all other variables are similar, PR may kick in (I think).

But what is the benefit of a high PR these days. For instance:

If the rumours are true, then a high PR site gets spidered more frequently - which of course is key becuase if (as you should be) writing new keyword rich content for your site (targeting the long tail of course) then a high pr is of a real benefit as it gets your page in google fast.

So if a PR5 site gets spidered once a week, what PR would i need to get spidered once a day (if these rumours are true) or again is it more complicated than my simple observation.

Can anyone confirm this or expand on this or more accurate observed benefits of a high PR?

[pageoneresults]

High PageRank™ = ...

• More frequent crawl cycles.
  
• Deeper crawls.
  
• TTL of 12-48 hours.
  
• Strong positions for two word searches (the highly competitive stuff).
  
• Authority.
  
• Multiple listings, especially with sub-domains.

The list is very extensive. I look at PR like the Richter Scale. If you look at the Richter Magnitudes, they are almost like PR. ;)

There are also some negative things that happen too. For one, you now end up on every link hunters radar. As soon as you hit PR7, you are now a moving target.

Also, I've seen some patterns with PR and I'd guess that it is industry specific. In some industries, you'll see high PR sites. In others, there may be a threshold of PR5 or PR6. Look at SEO sites for example, few have broken the PR7 barrier and when they do, they usually end up being smacked back down. ;)

[julinho]

PR may not be so important for competitive terms, but the farther a [search expression] is in the long tail, the higher the weight of PageRank in determing SERPs.

Google knows that SEOs are manipulating links and pages to rank for, say, [mortagages]; that's why Google devalues PR and comes up with hundreds of other criteria (trust, semantics, hilltop, whatever) to rank pages for [mortgages].

OTOH, few people bother to do SEO for [History of mortagage laws in Colonial Boston]; why would Google use expensive computational resources to generate this SERP, if old PageRank has already proven to work fine?

Having high PR means you have plenty of PR to distribute across your pages, meaning (provided you have good content) you will be in plenty of SERPs for long tail searches.

[sandpetra]

Now that's a bit more like it...pageoneresults