Does Links really equal PR

it shouldnt always, would like some experts opinions

[penfold25]

Im still all new to this but I am wondering does PR have soley to do with incoming links from other sites? Does it even reflect at all what kind of unique site you have etc.
Because ppl might know about your site but why on earth should all this linking be going on, fine on the search engine and maybe in relation to users visiting relevant other topics, but in terms of adjudicating how important a site is shouldnt be reflected just on links.

I can understand where google is coming from trying to meddle from the millions of garbage sites out there but a new site with new information who is using a popular topic will never ever see the light of day without promoting it heavily, even it is better

Then again why would someone who is trying not to make money bother to make an a good site and promote like hell till it actually reaches someone, if the motivation of financial reward wasnt there i doubt most webmasters would even bother

So my point, does PR always have to do with links, i think it doesnt but not sure about that , who decides that, google just allocates pr to them? eg government sites.

[Mohamed_E]

To answer your question (I have no desire to get into a philosophical debate :) ) PR itself depends exclusively on links.

On the other hand, the ranking of a page in response to a query depends on a combination of PR and of on-page factors.

For a good discussion see The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [www7.scu.edu.au].

[g1smd]

There are plenty of sites with no, or very low, PR that still turn up at #1 in SERPs for certain keywords. I have been involved with few myself. PR isn't the main factor.

In fact until the middle of last month I had never checked the PR of any website, and I've been on the net since 1996. The toolbar lasted two weeks.