Why Is PageRank Still Important?

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Nofollow Links
Nofollow links are links that contain the rel="nofollow" attribute . Originally, nofollow links did not pass PageRank.

Historically, some SEOs have used the nofollow attribute to sculpt the flow of PageRank. This practice has become known as "PageRank sculpting."

PageRank sculptors, for example, would write guest posts that linked to five different websites. And they would nofollow all the links except the one that pointed to their website. This way, they would ensure that they received all the link juice.

In 2009, Google's Matt Cutts claimed that PageRank sculpting would not work because PageRank would always be diluted by the presence of nofollow links.

In 2019, Google announced that it would treat nofollow attributes as “hints.” In other words, it would decide whether or not these links should pass PageRank.

Just because there is no longer a toolbar that gives us the czech republic phone data PageRank score of a web page does not mean that this metric is no longer used.

In 2017, Google's Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter that the algorithm still uses PageRank.

Screenshot of Gary Illyes' tweet about PageRank
Did you know that after 18 years, we still use PageRank (and 100 other signals) for rankings?
Google's John Mueller confirmed this in 2020:

Screenshot of the Tweet by John Mueller
Yes, we use PageRank internally, along with many, many other signals. It's not quite the same as the original version, there are a lot of idiosyncrasies (e.g. disavowed links, ignored links, etc.), and again, we use a lot of other signals that can have a lot more impact.
However, the PageRank algorithm is very different from what it originally was. As Google's Matt Cutts wrote in 2009.