[Halfdeck]

PR (that you have access to by use of toolbars programs sites etc) means nothing in the Serps

I wasnt talking about the Toolbar PR to me is a short for Public Relations or Puerto Rico.

If the toolbar shows me a site with a pagerank 2

There is no such thing as a PageRank 2. PageRank is a percentage, a number that represents the chance some dude accidentally winds up on your url by randomly clicking on links - a number between 0 ~ 100%. From that POV, assuming Google hasn't messed alot with their original algo, the sum of all webpages' PageRanks is one - where 1 = 100%.

with ~5,810,000,000 pages on the Interweb, average PageRank of a webpage is miniscle.

Imagine a scale. When a Googler gets on it, it reads 152.234 lb. When you get on it, it reads 4. Two months later, you gain 47 lb - it still reads 4. The scale reflects your weight; but lack of granularity and delay is enough to limit the accuracy of what you see.

I wouldn't say the number is meaningless, but there are better indicators.

Fortunately I can back it up too

That would be interesting

PageRank is flawed:

1. "Rich gets Richer" syndrome - domains that rank high gains organic links much quicker than new domains that are invisible.
2. PageRank is query-independent. Using only the PageRank algo to rank pages, a high PageRank page that's irrelevant to a query can outrank a less important page that's more relevant to the query. To deal with that shortcomming, people thought up stuff like Hilltop, CLEVER, HITS, and Topical PageRank.
3. Artificial links. Google's artificial detection algo is improving but its still far from perfect. Thus the advice to rel=nofollow; They wouldn't ask people to use that if their algos didn't need hand-holding.
4. Google's TrustRank algo can't tell between a low PageRank quality page and low PageRank spam. One possible reason you might see a new site outranked by a lot of garbage.

PageRank is built on the assumption that authoritative pages link to other authoritative pages. For example, LOR links to tommy's bookmarks, DangerDave, Linkforsex, Penisbot, etc, while a smaller LL tend to trade links with less authoritative sites. Authoritative sites tend to be very picky about who they link to; Google relies on that tendency to find "quality" websites.

Relevance is also important, but sometimes, WHO is saying something makes or breaks a message.

Google's crawl frequency and depth also depends on PageRank. Lack of PageRank means more pages in the supplemental index, and since IBLs from supplemental pages are weaker, having a large number of pages turn supplemental due to low PageRanks can cripple a site's ranking.

If you own blogs, you'll notice as you publish more posts, a page that used to rank high starts to lose position. On-page optimization hasn't changed. The page's authority score hasn't changed. Anchor texts on IBLs haven't changed. The only thing that's changing is less internal links pointing to the blog post (e.g. page rolls off the front page, no longer displayed as "recent post", etc).