There was a great article about Google PageRank (IMHO) posted by Bob Wakfer a while back that seems to be very accurate regarding this thread.

Hope it helps!

"apart from you have lots of incoming links) and what benefits does having a PR rank of 7 have over a PR rank of 6?"

What do you aprt from having lot of incoming links??? thats better than page rank each person that links to you is an increase in reach to your site. Page rank is one important part of the search algo, when seeing who ranks first google does look to pr to help it but it also looks at many other peices such as keyword density, meta, title, inbound link, outbound links, age of site in index...etc...dont want to give away the farm...

if PR has no bearing on optimisation, why do we bother with it? having a pretty number in a bar means nothing if it doesn't affect your ranking.

of course PR affects ranking. it is *GENERATED* by backlinks, but the end result number (1,2,3...or whatever the REAL value is) is used to multiply your optimisation score, and generate your overall ranking.

*THAT* is why PR is important

Thats DaveTodd, even though that is kind of covered ground their.

One of the theory we were getting into more depth about was that when the inbound link part come into the alogorithm, It can't be a multiply like suggested because it doesn't need any onpage optimisation, what do you think?