Wow, loaded question.
Buying PR sites and redirecting them to a site sometimes won't help at all. If the content of the PR ranked sites are totally irrelevant to the redirection, in time the PR will drop to nothing, sometimes very quickly. I know this from experience.
Many times a PR ranked site is best used as a parked page knowing what the site was all about and optimizing your keywords to match so the searches are still relevant. Even then, it seems only a matter of time before the traffic goes away.
Money spent on buying PR rankings might best be used to actually promote your site.
If it's backlinks you want, create your own rather than buy them. Use this tool:
http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php
Enter in different keywords relevant to your content as well as a number for each. Yes, it will take a little work and time but nothing comes easy or cheap, especially buying backlinks when you can create your own.
Yes, you can achieve page rank without backlinks. I have a PR 2 site in about 1 1/2 years with no backlinks. It is a specialty site with 355,000 users in 2006, up from 105,000 when lauched in June 2005. Through January 21, the users for the month of January 2007 was up to 30,580. So we are looking at potentially 600K plus users for 2007. This is from type in traffic, simply word of mouth advertising, from colleague to colleague. That type in traffic has led to very good rankings in some of the search engines without having to pay a penny for it so far.
My success comes from knowing my market, finding a void, filling that void and becoming a niche site. I am not going to sell or promote widgets if I don't know a damn thing about widgets. I am absolutely sure I could increase my PR by including backlinks. At the moment I do not want them on the site. Having backlinks for the sake of having backlinks is not always a good idea if the backlinks are not targeted to your audience. Knowing your audience and demographics is paramount to success. I will have back links but not just for the sake of having backlinks. Quantity does not equate to quality. Right now I am after quality of content specific to the site.
I hate to say it, but sometimes I think PR is overranked. And now it can be so easily manipulated that the site loses its own identity. How is it possible for a site to have a PR10 in 6 months? If I was going for a youtube or a myspace content, you better believe I would have hundreds or thousands of backlinks on it in no time.
I am getting ready to launch a national email and print campaign. But I wanted to wait until the numbers were there before I solicited sponsorship and paid advertising. I have redesigned the site and re-launched it Jan 2 of this year. Several changes, proper keyword and meta tags, indexing the site in a manner that google likes as well as other search engines has really helped. Having backlinks for the sake of having backlinks which may be in conflict with potential sponsors or advertisers would not be in my best interest. If I am courting a corporate sponsor having a site cluttered with additional ads or backlinks will not be too appealing, especially if I offer exclusivity.
All of this takes time and effort on your part. So if you are paying for all those PR pages simply for the links and traffic, it doesn't always work. If it is traffic you are buying, check the actual traffic stats. One of the most important and perhaps the key feature that I check is the number of years the domain has been regged or the site has been online.
My goodness, I could take my several thousand domain names, redirect all that traffic to a dogofadomain.com and get a PR ranking in no time. Then you buy it, all of a sudden all the traffic is gone, you complain, I tell you that you must have done something wrong or it got screwed up in the transfer. Then I go on to the next bowwowofadomain.com and do the same thing waiting for the next sucker...er, buyer...to come along.
This is just my opinion on the question. That's what's great about these forums...so many opinions and sometimes we may actually take something away from it and use it.
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