QUOTE(gregghawes @ Sep 15 2011, 07:40 AM)
If your talking about the toolbar page rank, it has no effect on your serps.
To get high PR all you need to do is get dofollow
backlinks from high pr web pages, the anchor text could say anything and the page wouldn't have to be in any way related to the content on your own website. The easiest way to do this would be dofollow blog comments.
To get high in the serps you need to have relevant
backlinks with optimized anchor texts from authority websites.
So picture this, 2 brand new websites going for the same keyword, 1 person is getting dofollow backlinks from high pr movable type blogs not related to the keyword and in the anchor text it says the owners name. The other person is getting backlinks from relevant pages with low pr but high authority domain and the anchor text contains the keywords. Each person gets 1000 links. The 1st person would end up with a higher toolbar page rank as more page rank has been passed to his website but he would be much lower in the serps for the keyword than the second person who has optimized his backlinks from relevant sources.
Check out Matt Cutts (google employee) youtube channel or have a read through the google webmaster forum where the toolbar rank is explained.
Dofollow backlink improve your PR, and dont forget that dofollow backlink is improving your SERP too
And SERP not only about "relevant backlinks with optimized anchor texts from authority websites", what you talking is only partial of the off-page SEO. There are still many factor including the onpage SEO such as h1,h2 tag, meta description etc. Besides, hosting, domain name etc is also some major factor that affect the SERP as well
FYI, Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google