How does pagerank of a website affect SEO?

[Coreal]

Is it compulsion that High PR websites rank better than the lower even though they have less contents?

[Yasoo]

1. PageRank adds weight and authority to your website
The higher a page is ranked, the better it will perform in organic search results.

2. A high PageRank measures the webpage's popularity
Your PageRank score is a crude way of measuring your website's popularity. The more sites linking back to your website is an indication that people consider your articles valuable - which is why they consider reading your content. The inbound links increase your traffic. Your high score simply means that you have valuable links – Google uses this factor to come up with a ranking algorithm.

3. Frequent indexes
If your website's pages have a high PageRank score, the Google spider is more likely to visit your site to index your articles or content. Google as well as other search engines prefer sites which get updates on a regular basis. In return, your webpage gets a high page rank which is also the search engine's way of flagging sites which need to be indexed more frequently.

4. Advertisers use your PageRank as basis for ad placements
If you want to generate income from search engine marketing such as paid links, pay per click or banner ads, how much you will get will largely depend on your page rank. The higher your page rank is, the higher your advertisers will pay you.

Simply put, your PageRank is like a badge of honor. It is a key to credibility, lucrative advertisements and link partnerships. So strive your best to come up with effective SEO and SEM campaigns to get a high score for your website.

[Caryn Tobler]

Page ranking does not really affect the SEO of a website since it has very little to do with it. In fact, page rank is a number that Google normally uses to show the complete value of your website in relation to other people's websites.

[Hal Smith]

High PR websites have always a plus over the low PR. The higher ranked sites have earned it, through proper SEO and quality management.

Hal Smith
URLdreamer Consultant

[Laci]

you can put links on your web site, to anyone you wish. however linking to "questionable web sites" will hurt your web site ranking.