A recent thread at SEW takes a poll asking whether anyone still cares about PageRank. The important thing for SEOs to remember, whether they are experienced or new to the optimization process is that PageRank, like link popularity, age, theme and dozens of others is simply a metric that can be used to measure your site against the competition.

PageRank in its initial form was designed to be a system for calculating the global popularity of a web page. This means, given a particular page on the web, how many other pages link to it and how important are those linking pages as compared to the web in general.

It's unknown whether the green bar in our toolbars still measures PageRank in the same way, but we can be relatively certain that it is still a measurement of the global popularity of a page. Therefore, PageRank has some definite uses:

• Completing a comparison/analysis chart of sites that are ranking for a particular keyword phrase
• Determining the relative popularity/importance of a site/page - i.e. PR3 site vs. PR8 site (not PR5 vs. PR6)
• Determining the global popularity neccessary to compete for a particular search

In addition, there are times when PageRank should not be used (or at least be marginalized):

• Determining whether to buy/trade/obtain a link from a page
• Deciding whether a site/page is a good resource or authority on a subject
• Determining the traffic levels, click-through rate, importance or any other un-related metric of a site/page