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I am doing research about backlinks/PR/SEO/Search Result position and all I read about is that PageRank is not important, that it worth before but now it's not important at all.

Only thing I found useful about it that is "change Search Result position", but ONLY if there are two sites with same keywords and same text content value, then Search Engine will check which site has higher PR and place that site above lowest one.

Google counts PR importance as 20% for displaying search rankings, and Yahoo! is like 3%...

Correct me if I am wrong...

Is there any other good thing from it?

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You are wrong. :) PageRank does not count for 20% of Google's algorithm. Yahoo doesn't use PageRank as it is exclusive to Google (although you can be sure they have something similar). PageRank used to account for a very large portion of Google's algorithm. In fact, it was what separated them from the rest and made the quality of their results so much better then the competition. But as we are very aware of now, PageRank by itself is not a good indicator of quality and can be easily manipulated. So, as time wore on, Google improved their ranking algorithm by adding many, many more quality indicators which reduced PageRank's value in their algorithm. While no one can say for sure just how much it influences rankings anymore, it is safe to say its role is greatly diminished and not very influential anymore. So much so that focusing on it is not a productive use of one's time.

Links from related web pages, especially those that rank well for the terms you wish to rank well for, are much more valuable then unrelated pages with high PageRank. PageRank is only an indicator of a page's link popularity, not its relevance for any particular search term. Since Google sees links as votes, a vote from a person who is knowledgeable on a topic is weighted much more heavily then a vote from someone who is popular but doesn't know anything about the topic.

This is why everyone who knows anything about SEO will tell you that content is king. Why? Because quality content will get you quality links. Quality links are those links from related websites that rank well for the phrases you want to rank well for. Webmasters only create those links when they see a web page that has the kind of content they want their readers to see. So, a smart webmaster will use their time to write great content instead of chasing PageRank. By doping that they'll get quality links and PR at the same time. Oh, and they'll get great rankings, too. All without having to ask other webmasters for links (or having to pay anybody for them, either).

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  • Plus Google announced that they'll be dinging overly SEO'd websites in the near future. It was announced at SXSW. We can start answering the more oddball SEO questions like that famous presidential campaign with, "It's the content, stupid." Get your content in order so people think you're worth linking to, the sooner, the better. Mar 26, 2012 at 18:21
  • @John So if one SEO company offers me backlinks from theirs sites, that they say that are relevant ( I need to chose my site category ), and they get my site high PR in time, should I trust them? They are also limiting backlinks per day to look as real linking. Will that help? Price is only 1$ per backlink... Those sites have relevant content, relevant keywords. Will that help my site somehow? Does that count good? Mar 26, 2012 at 18:33
  • @Fiasco it wasn't "announced" as such, Matt Cutts just unofficially mentioned it in passing. Take it with a pinch of salt. Mar 27, 2012 at 0:25
  • @Shark paying for backlinks (without nofollow) is a violation of Google's TOS so those links are unlikely to count. It's a waste of money. Mar 27, 2012 at 0:27
  • But how will Google know that those are payed links? Also, it's not violation of Google's TOS if I pay a company to share my site review on others related sites... It's advertising in one way, and also backlinking in another... Just I mentioned it as paid backlinks since we are talking about PR, and not advertising... It's actually advertising that pays attention not to ruin PR with adding 100s backlinks a day... Mar 27, 2012 at 2:07
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One thing i'd add to @John Conde's answer is where PageRank still has a material impact: Indexing.

Google has stated that the depth (of a site) and the frequency at which the Googlebot crawls a website is usually dictated by it's PageRank (the internal score, not the little green vanity bar).

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