Originally Posted by cyco_cc

I don't understand why people still hold this misconception. Maybe they don't think about how a system works together to achieve a result or understand basic graph theory.

Page Rank of a site is computed by the PR of the sites that link to it. Higher page rank = greater weight. The web (given this name for a reason) can be modeled as a directed graph with vertices as sites and edges as links. An authoritative site is one with many edges connected to it. Authoritative sites have higher PR based on this algorithm. Authoritative sites appear high in the SERPs because they are viewed as more relevant.

Page Rank is definitely a factor in Google's ranking algorithm, but it's not the only one. This is just simple mathematics, people. PR gives a numeric representation of the quality of incoming links to a site and nothing more. Even if the little green blob was done away with, Page Rank still exists because it is merely the computation of incoming links to a site. The idea has always been: If [Site X] is an authoritative site and it links to [Site Y], then [Site Y] must be relevant for related searches and will thus rank higher in the SERPs. And this is roughly how PR is computed.