I always get a kick out of the Pagerank (PR) debate that occurs in the webmaster community.  This is one of those hot topics where about half the people say Pagerank means nothing while the other half believes it does.  I personally side with those that believe Pagerank is important.

It seems that most everyone refuses to look at Google’s own explanation of Pagerank.  A quote from this page notes:

PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believes are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.