I have lots of doubts about PR (thanks to the numerous articles on the web that give numerous contradicting details about it ), But I will restrict myself to just three questions here.

1) Know this is a cliche, but anyways just to get my concepts clear "Does PageRank have any influence on the SERP rankings of a site?"

2) Many tools on the web claim to "predict" a site's future PR can this actually be done, is the info they provide true.Also I see that the info one tool provides contradicts that provided by another tool, which one do i trust.

3) Under what conditions do the PR of a site/page go down.

1) Sure - PageRank is still one of the major ranking factors on Google and increasing your PageRank will often increase your Google rankings provided the links gained are legitimate links from on-topic sites.

2) No. The algorithms used to determine actual PageRank (as used by Google internally to help determine rankings) are based on the sum total of the linking patterns of all the sites in the Google index. To actually predict PR you'd need to have the same index as Google...at which point you'd be a billionaire and could frankly care less about how to predict PageRank.

3) Getting new inbound links to your pages from reputable, on-topic pages is a good way to increase PageRank.

Thanks Marshall,

That sure did clarify my doubts. sorry for the delayed acknowledgement though.

cheers,
Badrinath.V.S :-)

Badrinath,

About (2). Some time ago I wrote an aricle in my blog about what I call current pr (http://rathamahata.blogspot.com/2005/11/current-future-for-toolbar-googles.html). It is all not about prediction, but about the fact that google is still allowing to lookup some value that could probably be a current pr (I personaly inlcined to believe in this :) ).