Is Google Page Rank Still Relevant?

It's 2013 and a lot has changed in the world of search engine optimization. After all of these years, is Page Rank still relevant? I remember when Google and Matt Cutts would update everyone with Page Rank updates and news every three months. Now they update it whenever they feel like it. So is it still relevant when it comes to search engine optimization, or relevant at all?

For a while webmasters would track their Page Rank religiously and use it as a factor in selling their websites thinking it gave their websites more value, which until a couple of years ago it did. Google would update Google Page Rank every three months and people would talk about it, create blog posts about it, etc. It was important and you bet it was relevant. But is it still relevant?

As time went on Google Page Rank was less talked about and it holds less importance than it did, say, five years ago or even two years ago. Maybe people finally realized that Page Rank was only one of hundreds of factors that determined your search engine rank.

Some people confuse Google Page Rank as being a metric, but it is actually an algorithm. Page Rank cannot be measures with confidence so it can't serve as a metric. Understanding this and how it works can be useful to webmasters.

Due to the heavy increase in the use of social media, Google had to find a way to factor social media into its algorithm. Although it is not clear how Google factored this in it's clear that they have and social media does influence a website's rank. Whether social media affects a website's Page Rank is still uncertain.

Page Rank helps deliver more relevant results in the search engine. But is Page Rank still relevant? If Page Rank is still relevant then what should webmasters do about that? Will be continue to build and develop our websites around link building to increase our Page Rank? Or will we ignore Page Rank like Google has for the past couple of years?

I personally think that we still need to focus on creating unique content that will entice our visitors to link back to it, therefore creating natural backlinks and increasing our rank in the search engines while increasing our Page Rank. But that may just be the search engine optimizer in me. Page Rank can be manipulated like Alexa can and right now Page Rank holds the same amount of importance as Alexa does (to me).

What do you guys think? Do you think that Google Page Rank is still relevant?