PR vs traffic relationship

[HardCoded]

My question is more of a thought experiment.

Is there a direct relationship between PR and the amount of traffic a website will...enjoy?

Let's be more precise. Is there a direct relationship between the PR of a particular page and the number of daily uniques that will come there from Google? After factoring in an appropriate value for the logarithmic PR scale, of course.

This might sound stupidly obvious on the face of it, but I'd like to hear some opinions.

[sparshpolly]

I will not comment on wether hits on a site have anything to do with Page Rank(already enough controversy in my other posts ) but I would like to say that even I agree with your viewpoint that uniques from google will increase if you have a high PR..
It is so obvious.....
Higher PR , better is Search result placement and more chances of your link getting clicked.

[Mel]

Higher PR does not necessarily mean higher ranking position, as a quick review of the SERPS will show. IMO PR is a minor ranking factor.

Higher rankings have a much greater correlation to traffic than PR, but even then the amount of traffic that visits your site is greatly affected by the SERP title an description displayed.

[HardCoded]

That was actually my position, that the relationship between PR and traffic would be tenuous at best. I had some thoughts that would have made this thread interesting, but I can see I'm not even going to get to first base.

How far can this decoupling go, though? Is there not even a loose coupling? Can you have PR 10 pages that get squat traffic, can you get PR0 pages that get tons? (From Google, let me qualify).

[jestep]

I think there are 2 benifits of high page rank.
1. Your site looks more reputable. It may not be but that big green bar always looks nice.
2. The real reason, is the ability to trade links. Since so many other people are caught in the Page Rank web, it is much much easier to get links from good sites if you have a high page rank.

[amabaie]

the amount of traffic that visits your site is greatly affected by the SERP title an description displayed

Bingo! Being #1 means nothing, if #2 looks so much more enticing to the searcher.

[daxesh]

High pagerank does not mean high rankings there are more than 100 factors which play important role in determining the search engine results.

[info202]

my site only has a PR ranking of 4, but it is #7 in search engine ranking for "affordable websites" (in Google), so it would appear that your PR ranking does not affect your search rank... and since most people in the net do not use the google or alexa bar, and even if they have any other these bars, they are using them for popup blocking, therefore, they have no clue about page ranking, so they are not visiting your site because of that.

[Martin Smith]

Mary Ann,

Your site is the first in the SERP to be optimised on page for the key phrase "affordable websites" - none of the sites above it contain that exact phrase in the title/body of the page.

My understanding is that pagerank is a multiplier. The importance of the pages above yours based on on-page factors is lower than yours, but because they all have higher PR, the overall importance of the page is calculated as being higher than yours.

BTW, well done for finding what I would guess is a quality niche key phrase.

[edhan]

I am always using Google to search for products that I want to purchase and those sites appearing in Top 10 does not have good Page Rank though. I do believe that traffic for sites are more related to the amount of visitors finding your site through means of search engines, advertisements, offline promotions, etc. Therefore having higher Page Rank does not mean you will have greater traffic.

Edward