First of all, Google Pagerank has nothing to do with Adwords… although indirectly I suppose it does. One of the reasons Adwords is so valuable is because you can go around this important factor that Google has… And it also might be a good thing if the website you are promoting has a high PR, because the visitor might see that website as being more important and more of an authority website… etc.
This is related to Search Engine Optimization and Organic Results…
Google uses PageRank to measure how important a website is. It’s based on a few factors, but the main factor is how many inbound links (and the quality of those links) you have pointing to your website.
PR is combined with Google’s Algorithm (other factors like the quality of your content and the number of times your keyword appears in the visible text etc.) to determine your position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)… if you notice the sites at the top of your search results they usually have more inbound links than the ones below them.
Sometimes, it’s close because the quality of links are important also. If you have a PR8 website pointing to you, you are in better shape than if you had a PR3 website pointing to you… in essence, it makes your website more important…
If you install Google’s toolbar… or if you visit:
http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/
…you will see a bar that says “PageRank”. That bar ranks a site from 1 to 10…
9 or 10 are very difficult to get. Google.com has a PR10… W3.org has a PR10… DMOZ has a PR9…
Those are websites that have a lot of links pointing to them. W3.org is considered an authority website…
It takes some effort to get to a PR5… generally, I think PR5 and up is really good. A lot of people when they are out looking for people to trade links with, like to focus on websites with a good PageRank…
Check this out… One of the biggest things PR is used for these days is determining the value of a web page and selling ad space based on the PR:
There is a lot of controversy as far as the true importance of PR goes. I’ve noticed most people that are against it are people that can’t seem to get it right.
In the beginning, PR was designed to be an indication of the importance and popularity of a website, but in true Webmaster fashion, a lot of community members were looking for different ways to get Inbound Links in order to manipulate Google. And from there the Link industry got a start… link exchanges, renting links, selling text links etc, etc….
I just saw a guy last week that spent over $650 to get PR3 or better links from 50 different websites…
One of the problems with it is that PR alone does not provide you with traffic…
You still need to have a well optimized website, have done your keyword research and considered the other 100+ factors (some known, some unknown) that Google uses to rank a site in the SERPs… PR might be an important factor, but it isn’t the only factor and it certainly hasn’t the weight anymore which it used to have.
AND ON top of that, getting 100s or 1000s of UNnatural links doesn’t give PR a good name AND can get your sites penalized quickly (PR bar will be greyed out or reset to 0!).
Some more info:
You are right, high page rank does not give high traffic, just look at frank kern’s blog no page rank but visitor are so many every single day…