PageRank was of paramount importance back then. At the time, AltaVista/Inktomi were easy to spam, and Google wasn't.
The google spam that actually works (or at least, worked a few years ago, before panda) requires setting up lots of sites, lots of independent IP blocks. That was much harder when PageRank appeared - hosting was damn expensive, VPSes were nowhere to be found.
PageRank was a huge thing. I used "and" queries in altavista at the time. It was no match.
