[Halfdeck]

Now to confuse the issue a little - there is a third element - called algo filters

Hey, let's stay on topic

you will run into many people that "think" they know how Google works based on their own experiences or repeating the claims of other "experts" - but I sure wouldnt want to run my business on heresay and unproven theories

Jeez, anything you disagree with is an "unproven theory" and whatever you agree with is fact, right? BTW what I'm saying is far from mainstream. Most SEO "experts" dismiss PageRank as a non-factor. In fact, a couple months back when I wrote PageRank is the primary factor determining supplemental results, Rand Fishkin (the guy who tried to propose during the last superbowl) told me he thinks what I said is "bogus." A relatively well-known black hatter also agreed with him.

Conclusion - (at least mine and some others that have dealt with this for many years) - if you base a business model or even your little hobby on a little green bar - you deserve to fail

PageRank is not a business model. It's more like gravity. If you have a good site, respected by other authoritative sites, you got a good chance ranking high on Google irregardless of what the toolbar says for a particular page.

TBPR is a rough reflection of a site's visibility. A TBPR 9 site (a site with a TBPR 9 root) is usually a site we've all heard of; there are a ton of TBPR 0 pages no one knows they exist.

By taking that width (22) and dividing it by 40 or whatever number he came up with you had what your REAL PR was

Well, that's just ridiculous

The one thing known about this little display for sure is that you can manipulate it to show whatever you want

Fake TBPR does absolutely nothing for your site, I don't have sympathy toward people who linktrade based solely on TBPR, and the tactic is well-known, so in case you didn't already know:

All you gotta do is redirect a page to a X TBPR page using a header PHP code or htaccess. I've tried both; one method works - I forget which. After PageRank export, you remove the redirect. Then you linktrade with high TBPR pages so that by the next update your TBPR will be "real."

A better indicator of domain strength is freshness of cache dates and the number of pages in the main index (as opposed to pages labeled as supplemental).

I currently have a page that ranks #1 in Google for a mid-level term that has a PR0. And we've all seen pages that rank higher than pages that have a much higher PR.

Yeah, but like Linkster said, what you see in your toolbar isn't PageRank. If the only ranking factor was PageRank, that fact would prove Google doesn't sort results according to PageRank, but I don't think anyone is insisting PageRank is the only ranking factor.

Bottom line: build a valuable site and build traffic to it - bookmarkers, organic links, sales, ranking, and PageRank will follow. There's a reason why Google's spam team leader thinks sites like Link-o-Rama and The Hun are quality porn sites - and the reason isn't high PageRank.

Build crappy niche hub-pages and try to linktrade your way into Google's front page - I think you'll find you just wasted your time.