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Now that is has been bumped, PR is/was important because PR is what makes Google what
it is. It was by far the most important factor for Google. There was a lot of competition in search
with many companies spending tens of millions of dollars trying to gain market share. Then
Larry and Sergey, two broke Stanford students, had a brilliant idea that beat the hell out of
Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, and all of the other engines. That idea was that good web pages that
people will really want to see are the pages that people link to - PR. Google, then called
Backrub, beat the sophisticated text analysis of the other engines by returning results ordered
almost completely by PR. Google has since reduced the importance of PR somewhat, but it's
still important to the ordering of results ad therefore traffic.
Of course, the top PR site doesn't come up #1 for ALL searches - being relevant for the
search words it's also important. If the people who link to you are relevant for the search
terms, even better.
Yes, Nate could spend a ton of money and get a high PR for a page with pictures of dog turds,
and it would probably come up #1 in a search for dog turd pictures. That's most often the right
answer - if you spend $10 million dollars on a site devoted to dog turd pics that's likely a site
people searching for do turd pics will want to see. That's assuming he put some text on the
page and perhaps in the alt tags so the Google could tell it was a page of dog turd pics.
Without any text, Google wouldn't know they were dog turd pics, so the PR would be wasted.
So PR isn't everything, but it's still important.
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