There is a lot of confusion between PageRank and search result rankings. Many people unnecessarily obsess over the importance of PageRank. The general assumption is that high PR equates high rankings. This is not necessarily true. There are PR8 sites that cannot be found in Google unless you specifically search for them by their company name. On the other hand, there are PR3 sites that can be found in the top search results for their specific keywords.

The truth is that PR is just one of the many factors that determines a page’s actual rank on search result page (SERP) for a given search query (See Matt Cutt’s comment).

It is very common to that a page with a lower PR is positioned higher on a SERP than a page with a higher PR. This shows that PR is not the most important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. A low-PR site that is properly optimized for a keyword phrase can outrank a high-PR site which is not keyword-optimized.

Toolbar PageRank vs. Actual PageRank

Google Toolbar allows you to see an approximate PR value for any indexed page. However, these PR values you see on the toolbar are not the actual PageRank values that Google takes into consideration while ranking web pages. The Google toolbar is segmented into 10 equal linear values from 0 to 10. The actual PR is, however, calculated on a logarithmic scale and is estimated to be between log base 5 and log base 10. But often it’s the toolbar PR value that most people talk about and unnecessarily agonize over.