Does Page-rank affect your rankings?

This thread at DP triggered me to write this post.
There had been debates earlier among SEO’s on whether how much of push would Google page rank give to a page to rank high on Google Search results.But it seems like there is no confusion these days on this topic.

The answer is - Google gives less or no importance to Page rank when ranking sites on it’s SERPS page.

Page Rank is only a collective measure of the importance of a page according to google’s algorithm and it’s not a scale to measure authenticity of a page and hence it’s place on the SERPs page.According to Google,

So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.

So it’s a combination of page rank and the “Text matching” thing that we’ve to be worried about and not just page rank alone. For example: - If you look at link farms - they always manage to get page rank 6 and above by fraudulent linking practices. Google does not encourage people to boost page rank by artificial methods(that’s again debatable as to what’s artificial and what’s not) or link purchases.

Google gives more importance to Authority links, Age of the domain,Authority, on site optimization factors to decide a sites rank on the SERPs page rather than page rank. Here’s an example.

Searching for “Free email” on Google India gives me the following results.(See screenshot)
Here is a chart showing the relation between page rank and SERPs position on google.

No 1 - Emailaddresses.com - PR 6
No 2 - Yahoo - PR 9
No 3 - Mail.com - PR 6
No 4 - About.com - PR 7
No 5 - Lycos - PR7
No 6 - Fepg.net - PR 5
No 7 - Hushmail - PR 7
No 8 - Free-stuff - PR 5
No 9 - Juno.com - PR 6

You can clearly see that there is no particular relation between the SERPs position and page rank.

So ultimately your web site’s position on Google depends on the following factors(well, almost).
On site optimization density - Keyword density, Meta tags used, General content , Outbound/Inbound links, Relevancy.
Link votes - Authoritative inbound links to the page, Neighborhood.
Age of domain - Your own domain, Age of domain linking to you.

And of course, how bad your competition is doing!