In discussions with SEO specialists I hear a lot lately that Google Pagerank is not important anymore. The reason for this statement is that Google has stated that PageRank is only one factor out of hundreds they use to determine the ranking of a page. So yes indeed, straight laced reasoning would lead to the conclusion that increasing your PageRank is not an exercise you should be doing when you try to get higher in the Search Results.

Or should you?

I disagree with this school of thought for three simple reasons:

1. It is the only quick metric you can compare between sites (in the same sector). If I need to know the current state of a site and I see that they have a pagerank of 4 and higher, I can safely conclude that the site is not doing badly. It probably has some good visibility in the Search Engines. It doesnt say however that this site is optimised for the right keywords or gets the right traffic or has a high conversion rate. You can see it as a Quick Ratio in Finance: It says something about the current financial state of the company, but the firm still could be bankrupt in a weeks time.
2. PageRank has a unfortunate name and most people who are not SEO specialist will see the word RANK as an indicator that it is ranked to something and that must mean that if there is a high number it is better then there is a low number.
3. Most important: People in general and loads of people in the industry still  think it is an important metric! So when you move from PR0 to PR3 you suddenly get a lot of link requests from other relevant sites. Those sites maybe only PR2 or 3, but when there is a link to your site there is still a benefit. Hwne you move above PR3 requesting links and automatic link building is suddenly very easy, accelerating the number of  your inbound links. But not only SEO professionals, also Journalists trawling the web to find information use the PageRank indicator to measure authority, with again a higher change to be mentioned in an article. Any way….another proof of the Thomas-Theorema:

“If one defines a situation as real, it is real in its consequences”

So as long as PageRank is still perceived an an important indicator it is not a bad strategy to try to increase the PageRank of your homepage or landing pages. It will make the rest of your SEO work a lot easier!

Peter