SEO Advice: What good is PageRank nowadays?
Coming straight from the Google HQ, this is actually a gem about what PageRank really is worth for these days.
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO advice: url canonicalization
"Normally if you don’t see crawled snippets and only see urls, it usually means that it would help to have more links to your site. More PageRank helps to get more crawling."
Now, this isn't exactly hot news, as many people knew about - and have actively used - inbound links from high PageRank pages to ensure timely spidering. During my experiments I've been able to get brand new websites noticed and indexed by search engines, especially Google and MSN, in 12 hours or less with just two or three inbound links from PR 3 - 5 pages.
But it's somewhat comforting to know PageRank is still used for something other than a distraction, if you know what I mean 
May 14th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Yeah,
PageRank become a simple fun toy. It’s strange how a LOT of people
continue to chase after higher PR.
Oh boy!
May 14th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Valeriu,
We agree to disagree here
While PageRank isn’t the ONLY factor that helps in your SE rankings, it is an indication of the site potential. And I emphasize indication and potential.
To see what I’m talking about here, go check the PR of first 10 results on any popular or moderately popular search term. While it is possible for a lower PR to outrank a higher PR - which just proves the affirmation PR is only one factor - usually you find higher SERPS positions held higher PR too.
So there’s at least one correlation between PR and SERPS position.
But the effectiveness of a higher PR is, and has always been, surrounded by a lot of myth and hype.
Now, you tell me you don’t want a PR 7+ website or that it won’t help in the rankings
November 29th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Is there any special techniques that can be used to optimize a wordpress blog on my server for SEO. One issue I see is no way to change the title tags on each page, where it seems to take the blog name for the home page.
I have several hundred 600+ inbound links.
I have pinged Technorati manually and used pingoat as well as pingomatic every time I add a new blog.
There is plenty of content, about 30 articles.
What else can I do? What else should I do to optimize my blog?