Coming straight from the Google HQ, this is actually a gem about what PageRank really is worth for these days.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO advice: url canonicalization

Normally if you don’t see crawled snippets and only see urls, it usually means that it would help to have more links to your site. More PageRank helps to get more crawling.

Now, this isn’t exactly hot news, as many people knew about – and have actively used – inbound links from high PageRank pages to ensure timely spidering. During my experiments I’ve been able to get brand new websites noticed and indexed by search engines, especially Google and MSN, in 12 hours or less with just two or three inbound links from PR 3 – 5 pages.

But it’s somewhat comforting to know PageRank is still used for something other than a distraction, if you know what I mean 😀